HISTOKY 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 




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HISTORY 

OF 

ENGLISH LITERATURE; 

WITH 

AN OUTLINE OF THE OEIGIN AND GEOWTH 

OF 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: 

ILLUSTRATED BY EXTRACTS. 



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By WILLIAM SPALDING, A.M., 

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PBOFESSOE OF LOGIC, KHETORTC, AND METAPHYSICS, IN THK UNIVEESn.'Y 
OF SAINT ANDREWS. 



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EDINBUKGH: 
OLIVER & BOYD, TWEEDDALE COURT. 

AGENTS IN LONDON, 

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 
MDCCCLIIT. 






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Printed by Oliver & Boyd, 
Tweeddale Coxxit, High Street, Edinburgh. 



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PREFACE. 



This volume is offered, as an Elementary Text-Book, to those who 
are interested in the instruction of young persons. 

The tenor of my own pursuits, and my hearty concurrence in the 
wish to see the systematic study of English Literature occupying a 
wider place in the course of a liberal education, seemed to justify 
me in attempting, at the request of the publishers, to frame an 
unambitious Manual, which should relate and explain some of the 
leading facts in the Intellectual History of our Nation. Those 
youthful students, for whose benefit the book is intended, will, 
I would fam hope, find it not ill calculated to serve, whether in the 
class-room or in the closet, as an incitement to the perusal, and 
a clue through the details, of works possessing higher pretensions, 
and imparting fuUer mformation. 

It is for others to decide whether, in ushering young readers into 
the field of Literary History, I have been able to make the study 
interesting or attractive to them. I am at least confident that the 
book does not contain any thing that is beyond then- comprehen- 
sion, either in its manner of describing facts, or in its criticisms of 
works, or in its incidental suggestion of critical and historical prin- 
ciples. ■ But, on the other hand, having much faith in the vigour of 
youtliful intelligence, and a strong deshe to aid in the right guid- 
ance of youthful feeling, I have not shrunk from availing myself 
freely of the opportunities, furnished profusely by a theme so noble, 
for endeavouring to prompt active thinking and to awaken refined 
and elevating sentiments. I have frequently invited the student to 
reflect, how closely the world of letters is related, in all its regions, 
to that world of reality and action in the midst of which it comes 
into being : how Literature is, in its origin, an effusion and per- 
petuation of human thoughts, and emotions, and wishes ; how it is, 

A 



2 PREFACE. 

in its processes, an art which obeys a consistent and philosophical 
theory ; how it is, in its.effects, one of the highest and most powerful 
of those mfiuences, that have been appointed to rule and change 
the social and moral life of man. 

The nature of the plan, according to which the materials are 
disposed, will appear from a glance at the Table of Contents. The 
History of Enghsh Literatm-e being distributed into Two great 
Sections, the First Part treats the earlier of the two. It describes 
the Literary Progress of the Nation from its dawn in the Anglo- 
Saxon Times, to the beginning of the Sixteenth Centmy, which is 
taken as the close of the Middle Ages. In the course of that long 
period, not only were the foundations of our native speech laid, but 
its structure may correctly be held to have been in aU essential 
points completed. Accordingly, the Outline of the Origin and 
Growth of the English Language, which could not conveniently 
have been incoi-porated with the earlier hterary chapters, seemed to 
find its fit place in the Second Part. The Third Part, resuming the 
History of our Literatm-e at the opening of Modern Times, traces 
its revolutions down to the present day. The changes that have 
occm-red in the language during this most recent period, appearing 
to be really nothing more than varieties of style, do not require a 
separate review, but receive incidental notice as they successively 
present themselves. 

The Historical Sm-vey of English Literature, announced in the 
title-page as the principal business of the volume, thus occupies the 
Fu'st and Tlurd Parts. The former of these, deahng with the 
Anglo-Saxon Times and the Middle Ages, is short. It is so con- 
structed, Kkewise, (unless the aim has been missed,) as to introduce 
the reader gi-aduaUy and easily to studies of this sort. It contains 
comparatively little speculation of any kind : and those literary 
monuments of the period, which were thought to be most worthy of 
attention, are described with considerable fulness, both in the hope 
of exciting interest, and because the books fall into the hands of 
few. In the Summary of Modern Literature which fiUs the Tliird 
Part, more frequent and sustamed efforts are made to arouse reflec- 
tion, both by occasional remarks on the relations between intel- 
lectual cultm-e and the other elements of society, and by hints 
as to the theoretical laws on which criticism should be founded. 
Modern works, also, while the characteristics of several of the most 
celebrated are discussed at considerable length, are hardly ever 
analyzed so fully as were some of the older ones ; and, as we ap- 
proach our own times, it is presumed that particular description of 
the contents of popular books becomes less and less imperative. 



PREFACE. 3 

In the course of those Literary Chapters, some information is 
given in regard to a large number of authors and their writings. 
But, of a great many of these, all that is told amounts to very little; 
and I may say, generally, that names of minor note, inserted only 
on account of circumstances marking them off from the vast crowd 
of names omitted, receive no further scrutiny than such as is required 
for indicating cm-sorUy the position of those who bore them. On a 
few of those great men, who have been our guides and masters in 
the departments of thought and invention that are most widely in- 
teresting, there is bestowed an amount of attention which may by 
some readers be thought excessive, but which to myself seemed 
likely to make the book both the more readable and the more 
useful. There must, however, be great diversity of opinion among 
diverse critics, both as to the selection of names to be commemo- 
rated, and as to the comparative prominence due to different authors, 
and works, and kinds of composition. It is enough for me to say, 
that, in these matters as in others, I have formed my judgment 
with due dehberation, and made the best use I could of all the infor- 
mation that is at my command. 

Many little points have been managed with a view to facilitate 
the use of the volume m public teaching. Dates, and other partic- 
ulars, which, though often not to be dispensed with, tend to ob- 
struct reading aloud, are, always where it is possible, thrown into the 
margm. Bibliogi'aphical details are generally avoided, except a 
few, which illustrate either the works described or the history of 
the author or his time. Hardly anywhere, for instance, are suc- 
cessive editions noted, unless when the student is asked to make 
himself acquainted with the English Translations of the Holy 
Bible ; an exception which is surely not wrong, in a work designed 
to assist in informing the minds of Christian youth. 

The Series of Illustrative Extracts is as full as it was found pos- 
sible to make it : and it is ample enough to throw much light on 
the narrative and observations furnished by the Text. The selec- 
tions have been made in obedience to the same considerations, which 
dictated copious criticisms of a few leading writers. The works 
quoted from are not many in comparison with those named in the 
bo-dy of the book, being only some of those that are most distin- 
guished as masterpieces of genius or most eminently characteristic 
as products of theh age : and the intention was, that every speci- 
men should be large enough to convey a notion, not altogether in- 
adequate, of its author's manner both in thought and in style. No 
Extracts are given in the First Part. The writers of those ancient 
times could not, at least tiU we reach the very latest of them, be 



PREFACE. 



understood by ordinary readers without explanatory and glossarial 
notes. Accordingly tlie quotations from their writings are thrown 
into the Second Part ; where verbal interpretation is less out of 
place ; and where, also, they serve the double use of illustrating the 
progress of the language, and of relieving the philological text by 
contrast or by their poetical pictures. In the Third Part, the Ex- 
tracts are subjoined, as footnotes, to the passages of the text in 
which the several authors are commemorated. No Extracts are 
presented from the Nineteenth Century. Its literary abundance 
and variety could not have been exemplified, either fairly or instruc- 
tively, without an apparatus of specimens so bulky as to be quite 
inadmissible : and the books are not only more widely known, 
but more easily to be found, than those of preceding times. 

The Second Part, offering a brief Summary of the Early His- 
tory of the English Language, fills about one-seventh of the 
volume. It must have, through the nature of the matter, a less 
popular and amusing aspect than the other Parts. But the topic 
handled in these Philological Chapters is quite as important 
as those that occupy the Literary ones. The story which this 
Part tells, should be familiar to every one who would understand 
thoroughly the History of English Literature; and therefore it 
deserved, if it did not rather positively require, admission as an 
appendix to a narrative in which that History is surveyed. A 
knowledge of it is yet more valuable to those who desire to gain, 
as every one among us must if he is justly to be called a well- 
educated man, an exact mastery of the Science of English Gram- 
mar. The description here given of the principal steps by which 
our native tongue was formed, illustrates, almost in every page, 
some characteristic fact in our literary history, or some distinctive 
feature in our ordinary speech. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUGTOEY CHAPTER. 

1. The Four Great Periods of English History. — 2. The Eoman Period. — 
3. The Dark Ages— The Anglo-Saxon Period.— 4. The Middle Ages— 
The Normans— Feudalism — The Eomish Church — Aspect of Mediaeval 
Literature. — 5. Languages used in the Middle Ages — French — English — 
Latin.— 6. Other Features of Literature in the Middle Ages — Its Sectional 
Character — The Want of Printing. — 7. Modern Times — Contrast of Modern 
Literature with Mediaeval. — 8. Lessons Taught by the Study of Literary 
Works— Lessons Taught by the Study of Literary History . Page 17 



PAET FIEST. 

LITERATUKE IN THE DARK AND MIDDLE AGES. 
A. D. 449— A. D. 1509. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

A.D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

SECTION FIRST : LITERATURE IN THE CELTIC AND LATIN 
TONGUES. 

1. The Four Languages used in Literature— Latin and Anglo-Saxon— The 
Two Celtic Tongues— The Welsh— The Irish and Scottish Gaelic— Celtic 
LiTEKATUEE. 2. GacHc Literature— Irish Metrical Relics and Prose 
Chronicles— Scottish Metrical Eelics — Ossian.— 3. Welsh Literature— 
The Triads— Supposed Fragments of the Bards — Romances — Legends of 
King Arthur. — Latin Liteeature. 4. Introduction of Christianity — 
Saint Patrick — Columba — Augustine. — 5. Learned Men — Superiority of 
Ireland— Intercourse with the Continent — The Anglo-Saxons in Rome. — 
6. The Four Great Names of the Times — Alcuin and Erigena — Bede and 
Alfred — Latin Learning among the Anglo-Saxons . Page 29 



b CONTENTS. 

CHAPTEK II. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 
A. D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

SECTION SECOND : LITEEATURE IN THE ANGLO-SAXON TONGUE. 

1. Usual Course of Early National Literature. — 2. Peculiar Character of 
Anglo-Saxon Literature — Its Causes. — Poetet. 3. National and Histor- 
ical Poems — The Tale of Beowulf— Other Specimens. — i. Poems Didac- 
tic and Eeligious — Extant Specimens — CaBdmon's Life and Poems. — 6. Ver- 
sification and Style of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. — Prose. 6. The Living Lan- 
guage freely used — Translations from the Scriptures. — 7. Original Com- 
position — Homilies — Miscellaneous Works — The Saxon Chronicle. — 
8. King Alfred— His Works— His Character . . Page 37 

CHAPTER III. 

THE NOEMAN TIMES. 

A. D. 1066— A. D. 1307. 

SECTION FIRST : LITERATURE IN THE LATIN TONGUE. 

Introduction o the Period. 1. Distrihution of Paces and Kingdoms. — 

2. Literary Character of the Times. — The Regular Latin Literature. 

3. Learning in the Eleventh Century — Lanfranc — Anselm. — 4. Philo- 
sophy and Physical Science in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries — 
Hales and Duns Scotus — Eoger Bacon. — 5. Historians — William of 
Malmesbury — Greofirey of Monmouth — Girald du Barri — Matthew Paris. 
— 6. Success in Poetry — Joseph of Exeter — Geoffrey de Vinsauf— Nigel 
Wircker's Ass. — The Irregular Latin Literature. 7. Latin Pasquin- 
ades — The Priest Golias — Walter Mapes. — 8. Collections of Tales in Latin 
— Gervase of Tilbury — The Seven Sages — The Gesta Eomanorum — 
Nature of the Stories. — 9. Uses of the Collections of Tales — Eeading in 
Monasteries — Manuals for Preachers — Morals annexed in the Gesta — 
Specimens. — 10. Use of the Latin Stories by the Poets — Chivalrous 
Eomances taken from them — Chaucer and Gower — Shakspeare and Sir 
Walter Scott — Miscellaneous Instances . . . Page 47 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE NOEMAN TIMES. 
A.D. 1066— A. D. 1307. 

SECTION SECOND : LITERATURE IN THE NORMAN-FRENCH AND 
SAXON-ENGLISH TONGUES. 

Norman-French. 1. The Two Languages of France — Poetry of the Nor- 
mans — The Fabliaux and Chivalrous Eomances. — 2. Anglo-Norman 
Eomances from English History — The Legend of Havelok— Growth of 
Fictitious Embellishments — Translations into English. — 3. Anglo-Nor- 
man Eomances of the Eound Table — Outline of their Story. — 4. Authors 
and Translators of Anglo-Norman Eomances — Chiefly Englishmen — 



CONTENTS. 7 

Borron— Gast— Mapes.— SAXON-EiS-GLisH. 5. Decay of the Anglo-Saxon 
Tongue — The Saxon Chronicle. — 6. Extant Eelics of Semi-Saxon English 
Verse — Historical Works partly from the French — Approach to the Eng- 
lish Tongue — The Brut of Layamon — Robert of Gloucester — Robert Man- 
nyng. — 7. Other Metrical Relics of Semi-Saxon and Early English Yerse 
— The Ormulum— The Owl and the Nightingale — Michael of Kildare — 
The Ancient English Drama .... Page 59 



CHAPTER V. 

THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND IN THE FOURTEENTH 
CENTURY. 

A. D. 1307— A. D. 1399. 

Introduction. 1. Social and Literary Character of the Period. — Litera- 
ture FROM 1307 TO 1350. 2. Occam's Philosophy — Ecclesiastics — English 
Poems. — Prose from 1350 to 1399. 3. Ecclesiastical Reforms — John 
Wycliffe— His Translation of the Bible — Mandeville — Trevisa — Chaucer. 
— Poetry from 1350 to 1399. 4. Minor Poets — The Visions of Pierce 
Plowman — Character of their Inventions — Chivalrous Romances, — 5. John 
Gower — His Works — Illustrations of the Confessio Amantis. — 6. Geofii-ey 
Chaucer — His Life — His Studies and Literary Character. — 7. Chaucer's 
Meti'ical Translations — His smaller Original Poems — The Flower and 
the Leaf. — 8. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales— Their Plan— The Prologue — 
Description of the Pilgrims. — 9. The Stories told by the Pilgrims — Their 
Character, Poetical and Moral .... Page 70 



CHAPTER VI. 

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, AND 
SCOTTISH IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH. 

A. D. 1399— A. D. 1509 ; and a. d. 1306— a. d. 1513. 

England. 1. Poetry — John Lydgate— His gtorie of Thebes. — 2. Lyd- 
gate's Minor Poems — Character of his Opinions and Feelings — Relapse 
into Monasticism — Specimens.— 3. Stephen Hawes — Analysis of his Pas- 
time of Pleasure. — 4. The Latest Metrical Romances— The Earliest Bal- 
lads — Chevy Chase — Robin Hood. — 5. Prose— ^Literary Dearth — Patrons 
of Learning — Hardyng — William Caxton — His Printing-Press and its 
Fruits.— Scotland. 6. Retrospect— Michael Scot— Thomas the Rhymer. 
— 7. The Fourteenth Century — John of Fordun — Wyntoun's Chronicle 
— The Bruce of John Barbour — Its Literary Merit — Its Language. — 
8. The Fifteenth Century— The King's Quair— Blind Harry the Minstrel 
— Brilliancy of Scottish Poetry late in the Centiuy — Henryson — His 
Testament of Cressida — Gawain Douglas — His Works. — 9. William Dun- 
bar — His Genius and Poetical Works — Scottish Prose still wanting — 
Universities founded — Printiag in Edinburgh . . Page 84 



CONTENTS. 



PAET SECOND. 

THE ORIGIN AND GEOWTH OF THE ENGLISH 
LANGUAGE. 



CHAPTER L 

THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 

A. D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF THE 
LANGUAGE. 

, The Families of European Tongues — The Celtic, Gothic, and Classical — 
The Anglo-Saxon a Grermanic Tongue of the Gothic Stock. — 2. Founders 
of the Anglo-Saxon Eace in England — Jutes, Saxons, Angles — The Old 
Frisic Dialect. — 3. History of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue — Prevalence of 
the Dialect of the West Saxons — Two Leading Dialects — The Saxon — 
The Anglian or Northumbrian. — 4. What Dialect of Anglo-Saxon passed 
into the Standard English Tongue ? — 5. Close Resemblance of the Anglo- 
Saxon Tongue to the English — Illustrated by Examples. — 6. 7. Alfred's 
Tale of Orpheus and Eurydice— Literal Translation and Notes. — 8. Csed- 
mon's Destruction of Pharaoh — Translated with Notes . Page 98 

CHAPTER XL 

THE SEMI-SAXON PERIOD. 
A. D. 1066— A. D. 1250. 



TRANSITION OF THE SAXON TONGUE INTO THE ENGLISH. 

1. Character of the Language in this Stage — Duration of the Period.— 2. The 
Kinds of Corruptions — Illustrated by Examples. — 3. Extract from 
the Saxon Chronicle Translated and Analyzed. — 4. Layamon's Brut — 
Analysis of its Language — Comparison with Language of the Chronicle. 
— 5. Extract from Layamon Translated and Analyzed . Page 112 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD 
A. D. 1250— A. D. 1500. 

FORMATION OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE. 

1. Principle of the Change — Inflections deserted — Substitutes to be found— 
The First Step already exemplified. — 2. Stages of the Ee-Construction — 
Early English— Middle English. Early English.— 3, Character of the 
Early English — Specimens. — 4. Extract from The Owl and the Night- 
ingale. — 5. Extract from the Legend of Thomas Becket. Middle 
English. — 6. Character of Middle English— The Main Features of the 
Modern Tongue established — Changes in Grammar — Changes in Vo- 
cabulary—Specimens — Chaucer. — 7. Extracts from Prologue to the Can- 
terbury Tales.— 8. Extracts from the Knight's Tale.— 9. Specimen of 
Chaucer's Prose. — 10. Language in the Early Part of the Fifteenth Cen- 
tury — Extract from Lydgate's Churl and Bkd. — 11. Language in the Lat- 
ter Part of the Fifteenth Century — Its Character — The Structure of the 
English Tongue substantially Completed — Extract from The Paston Let- 
ters. The Language op Scotland. — 12. A Gothic Dialect in North- 
Eastern Counties — An Anglo-Saxon Dialect in Southern Counties — 
Changes as in England. — 13, The Scottish Tongue in the Fourteenth 
Century — Extract from Barbour's Bruce. — 14. Great Changes in the Fif- 
teenth Century — Extract from Dunbar's Thistle and Eose . Page 120 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE SOUECES OF THE MODEEN ENGLISH TONGUE; 
AND THEIE COMPAEATIVE IMPOETANCE. 

1. Two Points — The Grammar — The "Vocabulary — Doctrine as to each. — 
Grammar. 2. English Grammar in Substance Anglo-Saxon — Enumera- 
tion of Particulars. — 3. General Doctrine — Our Deviations in Yerbs few 
— The chief of them — Our Deviations in Nouns and their Allies many 
— Description of them — Consequences. — 4. Position of Modern English 
among European Tongues — Leading Facts common to the History of all 
— Comparison of the Gothic Tongues with the Classical — Comparison of 
the English Tongue with both. — Vocabulary. 5. Glossarial Elements 
to be Weighed not Numbered — The Principal "Words of the English 
Tongue Anglo-Saxon — Seven Classes of Words from Saxon Eoots.— 

6. Words from Latin Eoots — Periods of Introduction — Kinds — Uses. — 

7. Words from French Eoots — Periods of Introduction — Kinds and Uses. 
— 8. Words from Greek Eoots. — 9. Words from Tongues yielding few. 
—10. Estimate, by Number, of Saxon Words Lost — Eemarks. — 11. Esti- 
mate of the Number of Saxon Words Eetained — Proportion as tested 
by the Dictionaries — Proportion as tested by Specimens from Popular 
Writers ....... Page 140 

a2 



10 CONTENTS. 



PAET THIED. 

THE LITERATUEE OF MODERN TIMES. 

A. D. 1509— A. D. 1852. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE AGE OF THE PKOTESTANT REFOEMATION. 

A. D. 1509— A. D. 1558. 

SECTION FIRST : SCHOLASTIC AND ECCLESIASTICAL LITERATURE 
IN ENGLAND. 

Introduction. 1. Impulses aflfecting Literature — Checks impeding it — 
The Eeformation — State Affairs — Classical Learning. 2. Influence of the 
Age on the Literature of the Next — Its Social Importance. Classical 
Learning. 3. Benefits of Printing— Greek and Latin Studies — Eminent 
Names — Theology. 4. Translations of the Holy Scriptures — Tyndale's 
Life and Labours — Coverdale — Rogers — Cranmer — Eeigns of Edward the 
Sixth and Mary — Increase of Printers. 5. Original English Writings in 
Theology — Their Character — Eidley — Cranmer — Tyndale's Treatises — 
Latimer's Sermons — Character of his Oratory . . Page 157 

CHAPTER 11. 

THE AGE OF THE PEOTESTANT EEFOEMATION. 

A. D. 1509— A. D. 1558. . 

SECTION SECOND : MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE IN ENGLAND ; 

AND LITERATURE ECCLESIASTICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 

IN SCOTLAND. 

Miscellaneous Peose in England. 1. Secondary Importance of the 
Works — Sir Thomas More — His Style — His Historical Writings — His 
Tracts and Letters. — 2. Eoger Ascham — His Style — His Toxophilus — 
His Schoolmaster — Prosody — Female Education — Wilson's Logic and 
Ehetoric. — English Poetry. 3. Poetical Aspect and Eelations of the 
Age — Its Earliest Poetry — Satires — Barklay — Skelton's Works. — 4. Lord 
Surrey — His Literary Influence — Its Causes — His Italian Studies — His 
Sonnets — Introduction of Blank Verse — His Supposed Influence on Eng- 
lish Versification.— 5. Wyatt— Translations of the Psalms — The Mirror 
of Magistrates — Its Influence — Its Plan and Authors — Sackville's Induc- 
tion and Complaint of Buckingham. — Infancy op the English Drama. 
6. Eetrospect — The English Drama in the Middle Ages — Its Eeligious 
Cast— The Miracle-Plays— The Moral-Plays.— 7. The Drama in the Six- 



CONTENTS. 11 

teenth Century — Its Beginnings — Skelton— Bishop Bale's Moral Plays— 
Heywood's Interludes. — 8. Appearance of Tragedy and Comedy — Udall's 
Comedy of Eoister Bolster — The Tragedy of Gorhoduc, by Sackville and 
Norton, — Literature in Scotland. 9. Literary Character of the 
Period— Obstacles — State of the Language. — 10. Scottish Poetry — 
Sir David Lindsay — His Satirical Play — Its Design and Effects— His 
other Poems. — 11. First Appearance of Original Scottish Prose — Trans- 
lations — The Complaint of Scotland — Pitscottie — State of Learning — 
Boece — John Major. — 12. John Knox — George Buchanan's Latin Works 
— Other Latinists — Melville — Universities — Schools . Page 169 

CHAPTER III. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON 

A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION FIRST : GENERAL VIEW OF THE PERIOD. 

Introduction. 1. The Early Tears of Elizabeth's Eeign — Summary of 
their Literature.— 2. Literary Greatness of the next Eighty Years — 
Division into Four Eras.— Eeign op Elizabeth from 1580. 3. Social 
Character of the Time — Its Eeligious Aspect — Effects on Literatui-e. — 4. 
Minor Elizabethan "Writers — Their Literary Importance — The Three 
Great Names. — 5. The Poetry of Spenser and Shakspeare — The Eloquence 
of Hooker. — Eeign of James. 6. Its Social and Literary Character — 
Distinguished Names — Bacon — Theologians — Poets. — The Two follow- 
ing Eras. 7. Political and Ecclesiastical Changes — Effects on Thinking 
— Effects on Poetry — Milton's Youth. — 8. Moral Aspect of the Time- 
Effects on Literatm-e. — Eeign of Charles. 9. Literary Events — Poetry 
— Eloquence — Theologians — Erudition. — The Commonwealth and Pro- 
"tectorate. 10. Literary Events — Poetry Checked — Modem Symptoms 
— Philosophy — Hobbes — Theology — Hall, Taylor, and Baxter. — 11. Elo- 
quence — Milton's Prose Works — Modern Symptoms — Style of the Old 
English Prose Writers ..... Page 195 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 
A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION SECOND : THE SCHOLASTIC AND ECCLESIASTICAL 

LITERATURE. 

Erudition, Classical and Ecclesiastical. 1. General State of Eccle- 
siastical Learning — Eminent Names — Eaynolds — Andrewes — Usher — 
Classical Studies — Camden and Selden— Latin Prose and Verse. — Trans- 
lations OF the Holy Bible. 2. The Geneva Bible — Whittingham — 
The Bishops' Bible— Parker. — 3. King James's Bible — Its History — The 
Translators— Its Universal Eeception. — Original Theological Writi 
INGS. 4. The Elizabethan Period — Hooker's Ecclesiastical, orks.— 9- 
Reign of James — Sermons of Bishop Andrewes— Sermons of I Page 288 



12 CONTENTS. 

Reign of Charles — Hall and Taylor compared. — 6. Bishop Hall — His 
Sermons — His other Works. — 7. Jeremy Taylor — His Treatises — His 
Sermons — Character of his Eloquence. — 8. The Commonwealth and Pro- 
tectorate — Controrersial Writings — The Puritans — Eichard Baxter — His 
Life and Works ...... Page 213 

CHAPTER Y. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 
A.D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION THIRD : THE MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE. 

SEjn-THEOLOGiCAL Wbiteks. 1. Fullcr's Works — Cudworth — Henry More. 
— Philosophical Wkitees. 2. Lord Bacon— The Design of his Philoso- 
phy—His Two Problems— His Chief Works.— 3. Hobhes— His Political 
and Social Theories — His Ethics — His Psychology — His Style. — Histor- 
ical Wkiteks. 4. Social and Political Theories — Antiquaries — Histo- 
rians — Ealeigh — Milton's History of England — His Historical and Po- 
lemical Tracts— His Style.— Miscellaneous Wkitees. 5. Writers of 
Voyages and Travels — Literary Critics — Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of 
Poesy — Eomances and Novels — Sidney's Arcadia — Short Novels — Greene 
— ^Lyly — Pamphlets — Controversy on the Stage — Martin Mar-Prelate — 
Smectymnuus. — 6. Essays describing Chai'acters — Didactic Essays — 
Bacon — Selden — Burton — Browne — Cowley . . Page 232 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE DRAMATIC POETRY. 

Inteoduction. 1. The Drama a Species of Poetry — Eecitation of Narrative 
Poems and Plays — Effects of Eecitation on the Character of the Works — 
Eelations of Prose and Verse to Poetry. — 2. The Eegular and Irregular 
Schools of Dramatic Ai-t — The French Eules — The Unities of Time and 
Place— Their Principle— Their Effects.— 3. The Unity of Action— Its 
Principle — Its Eelations to the Other Unities — The Union of Tragedy and 
Comedy. — Shakspeaee and the Old English Deama. 4. Its Four 
Stages. — 6. The First Stage — Shakspeare's Predecessors and Earliest 
Works — Marlowe — Greene. — 6. Shakspeare's Earliest Histories and 
Comedies — Character of the Early Comedies.— 7. The Second Stage— 
Shakspeare's Later Histories — His Best Comedies. — 8. The Third Stage 
— Shakspeare's Great Tragedies — His Latest Works.— 9. Estimate of 
Shakspeare's Genius. — Minoe Deamatic Poets. 10. Shakspeare's Con- 
temporaries — Their Genius — Their Morality. — 11. Beaumont and Flet- 
,cher.— 12. Ben Jonson.— 13. Minor Dramatists— Middleton— Webster — 
6. Eerixcid— Dekker. — 14. The Fourth Stage of the Drama — Massinger — 
Cast— Th irley— Moral Declension . . . Page 250 



CONTENTS. 13 

CHAPTEE VII. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION FIFTH : THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY. 

Spenser's Poetet. 1. His Genius — His Minor Poems. — 2. Spenser's Faerie 
Queene — Its Design. — 3. Allegories of the Faerie Queene — Its Poetical 
Character. — 4. The Stories of the Six Books of the Faerie Queene. — Minor 
Poets. 5. The Great Variety in the Kinds of Poetry — Classification of 
them. — 6. Metrical Translations — Marlowe — Chapman— Fairfax — Sandys. 
— 7. Historical Narrative Poems — Shakspeare — Daniel — Drayton — Giles 
and Phineas Fletcher. — 8. Pastorals— Pastoral Dramas of Fletcher and 
Jonson — "Warner — Drayton — Wither — Browne. — 9. Descriptive Poems — 
Drayton's Poly-Olhion — Didactic Poems — Lord Brooke and Davies — Her- 
bert and Quarles— Poetical Satires — Hall — Marston — Donne. — 10. Earlier 
Lyrical Poems — Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Jonson — Ballads — Sonnets of 
Drummond and Daniel. — 11. Lyrical Poems of the Metaphysical School — 
Donne and Cowley — Lyrics and other Poems of a Modern Cast — Denham 
and Waller.— Milton's Poetry. 12. His Life and Works.— 13. His Minor 
Poems — L'Allegro and II Penseroso — Comus — Lycidas — Ode on the Nativ- 
ity—Later Poems— Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. — 14. The 
Paradise Lost ...... 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE AGE OF THE EESTOEATION AND THE EEVOLUTION. 

A. D. 1660— A. D. 1702. 

1. Social and Literary Character of the Period. — Prose. 2. Theology — 
Leighton — Sermons of South, Tillotson, and Barrow — Nonconformist 
Divines — Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress — The Philosophy of Locke — Bent- 
ley and Classical Learning. — 3. Antiquaries and Historians — Lord Claren- 
don's History — Bishop Burnet's Histories. — 4. Miscellaneous Prose — 
Walton — Evelyn— L'Estrange — Butler and Marvell — John Dryden's 
Prose Writings— His Style— His Critical Opinions— Temple's Essays. — 
Poetry. 5. Dramas — Their Character — French Influences — Dryden's 
Plays— Tragedies of Lee, Otwj y, and Southerne— The Prose Comedies 
—Their Moral Foulness. — 6. j.^oetry Not Dramatic— Its Didactic and 
Satiric Character— Inferences.— 7. Minor Poets— Eoscommon— Marvell 
—Butler's Hudibras— Prior — i. John Dryden's Life and Works.— 9- 
Dryden's Poetical Character .... Page 288 



14 CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE EiaHTEENTH CENTURY. 

A. D. 1702— A. D. 1800. 

SECTION FIRST : THE LITERARY CHARACTER AND CHANGES 
OF THE PERIOD. 

1. Character of the Period as a Whole — Its Eelations to Our Own Time.— 
2. Literary Character of its First Generation — The Age of Queen Anne 
and George I. — 3. Literary Character of its Second and Third Gener- 
ations — From the Accession of George II. — 4. The Prose Style of the 
First Generation — Addison — Swift. — 5. The Prose Style of the Second 
and Third Generations — Johnson . . . Page 306 

CHAPTER X. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION SECOND : THE LITERATURE OF THE FIRST GENERATION, 

A. D. 1702— A. D. 1727. 

Poetry. 1. The Drama — Non-Dramatic Poetry — Its Artificial Character 
— Minor Poets. — 2. Alexander Pope — Characteristics of his Genius and 
Poetry. — 3. Pope's "Works — His Early Poems — Poems of Middle Age — 
His Later Poems. — Peose. 4. Theologians — Philosophers — Clarke's Nat- 
ural Theology — Bishop Berkeley's Idealism — Shaftesbury — Bolingbroke. 
— 5. Miscellaneous Prose — Occasional Writings — Defoe and Eobinson 
Crusoe — Swift's Works and Literary Character — Other Prose Satires. — 
6. The Periodical Essayists — Addison and Steele — The Spectator — Its 
Character — Its Design ..... Page 313 

CHAPTER XI. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION THIRD : THE LITERATURE OF THE SECOND GENERATION. 

A. D. 1727— A. D. 1760. 

Prose. 1. Theology — Warburton — Bishop Sutler's Analogy — Watts and 
Doddridge — Philosophy — Butler's Ethical System — The Metaphysics of 
David Hume — Jonathan Edwards — Fran'din.— 2. Miscellaneous Prose — 
Minor Writers — New Series of Periodical J i^ssays — Magazines and Eeviews. 
— 3. Samuel Johnson— His Life— His L-.terary Character. — 4. Johnson's 
Works.— 5. The Novelists— Their Morrl Faultiness.— Poetry. 6. The 
Drama — Non-Dramatic Poetry — Else ir'. Poetical Tone — Didactic Poems 
— Johnson — Young — Akenside — Nan-ative and Descriptive Poems — 
Thomson's Seasons. — 7. Poetical Taste cf the Public — Lyrical Poems of 
Gray and Collins . . . . . . Page 329 



CONTENTS. 15 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE LITERATURE OF THE THIRD GENERATION. 

A. D. 1760— A. D. 1800. 

Prose. 1. The Historians — Their Literary Character and Views of Art — 
Hume's History. — 2. Eobertson and Gibbon — The Character of each — 
Minor Historical Writers. — 3. Miscellaneous Prose — Johnson's Talk and 
Boswell's Eeport of it — Goldsmith's Novels — Literature in Scotland — The 
first Edinburgh Eeview — Mackenzie's Novels — Other Novelists. — 4. Crit- 
icism — Percy's Eeliques — Warton's History — Parliamentary Eloquence 
— Edmund Burke — Letters. — 5. Philosophy — (1.) Theory of Literature — 
Burke — Eeynolds — Campbell — Home — Blair — Smith — (2.) Political Econ- 
omy — Adam Smith. — 6. Philosophy continued — (3.) Ethics— Adam 
Smith — Tucker— Paley — (4.) Metaphysics and Psychology — Thomas Eeid. 
—7. Theology— (1.) Scientific— Campbell— Paley— Watson— Lowth— (2.) 
Practical — Porteous — Blair — Newton and others. — Poetry. 8. The 
Drama — Home's Douglas — Comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan — Gold- 
smith's Descriptive Poems. — 9. Minor Poets — Their Various Tendencies 
— Later Poems — Beattie's Minstrel. — 10. The Genius and Writings of 
Cowper and Burns ..... Page 344 

CHAPTER XIII. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION FIRST : THE CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 

A. D. 1800— A. D. 1852. 

1. General Character of the Last Fifty Years — Tvro Ages embraced in the 
Period.— 2. The First Age— Its Poetry— Its Poetical Eminence and Char- 
acteristics. — 3. The First Age — Its Prose — Novels — The Eeviews and 
other Periodicals — Variety of its Productions. — 4. Foreign Impulses 
afiecting the whole Period. — 5. The Second Age — Its Mixed Character 
—Its Social Aspects ..... Page 360 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION SECOND : THE POETRY OF THE FIRST AGE. 
A. D. 1800— A. D. 1830. 

1. First Group of Leading Poets — ^Campbell. — 2. Southey. — 3. Second 
Group — Scott and Byron. — 4. Scott's Characteristics and Works. — 5. 
Byron's Characteristics, Ethical and Poetical. — 6. Third Group — Coleridge 
and Wordsworth — Coleridge's Genius and Works. — 7. Wordsworth — Fea- 
tures of his Poetical Character. — 8. Wordsworth — His Poetical Theory — 
Its Efiect on his Works. — 9. Fourth Group — Wilson — Shelley — Keats. — 
10. Crabbe and Moore — Dramatic Poems — Miscellaneous Names — Sacred 
Poetry ....... Page 367 



16 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XV. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

SECTION THIRD : THE PEOSE OF THE FIRST AGE. 

A.D. 1800— A. D. 1830. 

1. Novels and Eomances— The Waverley Novels — Minor Novelists.— 2. 
Periodical Writing — The Edinburgh Eeview — The Quarterly Eeview — 
Blackwood's Magazine. — 3. Criticism — The Essays of Francis Jeffrey. — 

4. Criticism and Miscellanies — Coleridge— Hazlitt — Lamb — Christopher 
North. — 5. Social Science — Jeremy Bentham — Political Economy— His- 
tory — Minor Historical Writers — Hallam's Historical Works. — 6. Theo- 
logy — Church History — Classical Learning — Scientific Theology — Prac- 
tical Theology — John Foster — Eobert Hall — Thomas Chalmers. — 7. 
Speculative Philosophy — (1.) Metaphysics and Pyschology — Dugald 
Stewart and Thomas Brown — (2.) Ethical Science— Mackintosh — Jeremy 
Bentham— (3.) The Theory of the Beautiful— Alison— J effi-ey— Stewart- 
Knight — Brown — Symptoms of Further Change . . Page 383 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE LITERATURE OF THE SECOND AGE, 

A.D. 1830— A.D. 1852. 

1. Poetry — Minor Poets.— 2. The Genius and Works of Tennyson. — 3. Novels 
— Bulwer — Minor Novelists — Thackeray — Dickens. — 4. Essays and His- 
tories — Hallam's Literature of Em-ope — De Quincey's Criticisms — Mac- 
aulay's Essays and History — Alison's History — Carlyle's Works. — 

5. Eeligious Works — Newspapers — Eeviews and Magazines — Instruction 
for the People — Encyclopaedias. — 6. Philology, Anglo-Saxon, English, 
and Classical — History, Classical and Modern — Travels. — 7. Physical 
Science — Political Economy — Logic — Whewell — John JMill — ^Metaphysics 
and Psychology— Sir William Hamilton.— Coxtemporaey American 
LiTEEATDKE. — 8. History and Character of Literary Progress' in~"Xme- 
rica. — 9. Eetrospect— The First Age of the Century— Novelists — Irving 
and Cooper — Poets — Bryant and Dana. — 10. Poets of the Present Day — 
Mrs Brooke— Longfellow — Novels andEomances. — 11. Theology — Chan- 
ning — Mental Philosophy— Orations and Periodicals — History — Bancroft 
and Prescott . .... Page 396 



HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE, 



INTEODUCTOEY CHAPTEE. 



Periods of Eiiglish History. 

I. The Eoman Period :— B. C. 55— A. D. 449. 
II. The Anglo-Saxon Peeiod :— A. D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

III. The Middle Ages :— A. D. '1066— A. D. 1509. 

IV. MoDEEN Tbies :— a. D. 1509— A. D. 1852. 



1. The Four Great Periods of English History. — 2. The Eoman Period. — 
3. The Dark Ages — The Anglo-Saxon Period. — 4. The Middle Ages — 
The Kormans — Feudalism — The Eomish Church — Aspect of Mediaeval 
Literature. — 5. Languages used in the Middle Ages — French — English — 
Latin.— 6. Other Features of Literature in the Middle Ages — Its Sectional 
Character — The Want of Printing. — 7. Modern Times — Contrast of Modern 
Literatui'e with Mediseval. — 8. Lessons Taught \>j the Study of Literary 
"Works— Lessons Taught by the Study of Literary History. 

1. The Literature of our native country, like that of every other, 
is related, intimately and at many points, to the History of the 
Nation. The great social epochs are thus also the epochs of 
intellectual cultivation ; and, accordingly, our literary annals may 
be arranged in Four successive Periods. 

The Eoman Period, which is the first of these, is much shorter 
for England than for some nations of the continent. It begins only 
with the landing of Julius Csesar ; and it closes with the year which 
is usually supposed to have been the date of the earliest Germanic 
settlements in the island. It thus embraces five centm-ies. 

Next comes om^ Anglo-Saxon Period, which, after endm-ing about 
six centuries, was brought to an end by the invasion of William 
the Conqueror. It corresponds with that tumultuous stage in Euro- 
pean History, which we know by the name of the Dark Ages. 



18 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

Our Third Period, beginning with the Norman Conquest, may be 
set down as ending with the Protestant Keformation, or at the 
accession of Henry the Eighth. It has thus a length of about 
four centuries and a half; and these, the Dark Ages having already 
been set apart, are the Middle Ages of England as of Europe. 

From the dawn of the Eeformation to the present day, there 
has elapsed a Period of three centuries and a half, which are the 
Modern Times of all Christendom. 

Let us. take, at the opening of these studies, a bird's-eye view of 
the regions thus laid down on our historical map. 

The first of our four periods, having bequeathed no literary 
remains native to om- soil, will afterwards drop out of sight. To 
the other three, in their order, are referable all the shorter stages 
into which the history of our literary progress will be subdivided ; 
and the particular features of each of these will be comprehended 
the more readily, if we remember the general character of the great 
historical division to which it belongs. 

2. A hasty glance over the Eoman Period teaches two facts 
which«we ought to know. 

In the first place, the only native inhabitants of England, cer- 
tainly with few exceptions, and j)erhaps without any, belonged to the 
great race of Celts. Another Celtic tribe occupied Ireland, and 
was spread extensively over Scotland. None of these were the true 
founders of the English nation : but the state of the English Celts 
under the Eomans afiected in no small degree the events which 
next followed. 

Secondly, Eome introduced into our island many changes ; yet 
these were fewer and less extensive than the revolutions which she 
worked elsewhere. 

In some continental countries, of which Gaul was an instance, 
the Eomans, forming close relations with the vanquished, diffiised 
almost universally their institutions, habits, and speech. Their 
position among us was quite unlike this. It rather resembled • that 
which, in the earliest settlements of the Europeans in India, a few 
armed garrisons of invaders held amidst the surrounding natives, 
from whom, whether they were submissive or rebellious, the foreign 
troops stood proudly apart. Nowhere, even when the Eoman 
conquerors were most powerful, did there take place, between them 
and the Britons, any union extensive enough to alter at aU mate- 
rially the nationality of the people. Nowhere, accordingly, did 
the Latin language permanently displace the native tongues. 

Still, besides the thinly scattered hordes who continued to hunt in 
the marshy forests, and to build their log- villages in the wilderness 



INTRODUCTOKY CHAPTER. 19 

for rude shelter and defence, there were a few large civic communi- 
ties, to whom their military masters taught successfully both the 
useful arts and many of the luxuries of the south. The knowl- 
edge and tastes thus introduced among the British Celts were not 
uncommunicated to those vigorous invaders, whose occupation of 
the island speedily followed the retirement of the imperial armies. 

3. The Ages which succeeded the Fall of the Roman Empire, do, 
in many points, weU deserve their name of Dark. But the gloom 
which covered them was that which goes before sunrise ; and bright 
rays of light were already breaking through. 

The great event was that vast series of emigrations, which planted 
tribes of Gothic blood over large tracts of Em-ope, and established 
that race as sovereigns in other regions, where the population suf- 
fered but little change. The earliest stages of formation were then 
undergone by all the languages now spoken in European countries. 
Christianity, which had been made known in some quarters during 
the Roman Times, was professed almost universally before the 
Dark Ages reached their close. 

Our Anglo-Saxon invaders were Goths of the Germanic or 
Teutonic stock. Their position in Britain was quite unlike that 
which had been held by the Romans. Instead of merely stationing 
garrisons to overawe, they planted colonies, large and many, which 
poured in an immense stream of population. They continued to 
emigrate from the continent for more than a hundred years after 
their first appearance; and by the end of that period they had 
established settlements covering a very large proportion of the 
island, as far northward as the shores of the Forth. Before many 
generations had passed away, their language^ and customs, and 
national character, were as generally prevalent, throughout the pro- 
vinces which they had seized, as the modern English tongue and 
its accompaniments have become in the United States. 

We do not look with much hope for literary cultivation among 
the Anglo-Saxons. It is surprising that they should have left so 
many monuments of intellectual energy as they have. The frag- 
ments which are extant possess a singular value, as illustrations of 
the character of a very singular people: and most of them are 
written in that which is reaUy our mother-tongue. 

During the six hundred years of their independence, the nation 
made, in spite of wars, and calamities, and obstacles of aU kinds, 
wonderful progress in the arts of life and thought. They learned 
much from the subdued Britons, not a little from the continent, 
and yet more from their own practical good-sense, guided wisely 
by several patriotic kings and churchmen. The pagans accepted 



20 INTEODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

the Christian faith : the piratical sea-kings betook themselves to 
the tillage of the soU, and to the practice of some of the coarser 
manufactures : the fierce soldiers constructed, out of the materials 
of legislation common to the whole Teutonic race, a manly and 
systematic political constitution. 

4, The Third of our Periods, here called the Middle Ages, differs 
strikingly from the Ages described as Dark. The latter -were 
seemingly fruitful in nothing but undecided conflicts : no-w we reach 
a state of things quite dissimilar. The painful convulsions in which 
infant society had writhed, made way for the growing vigour of 
healthy though undisciplined youth. 

All the relations of life were thenceforth modified, more or less, 
by two influences, predominant in the early part- of the period, 
decaying in the latter. The one was that of Feudalism, the other 
that of the Chm'ch of Rome. Literature was especially nourished 
by the consolidation of the new Languages, which were now succes- 
sively developed in all countries of Europe. 

Li the general history of Em'opean society, the Middle Ages are 
conunonly held as brought to an end by two events which occurred 
nearly at the same time : the erection of the Great Monarchies on 
the ruins of Feudalism ; and the shattering of the sovereignty of 
the Romish Church by the Protestant Refoimation. These epochs, 
likewise, come close to the most important fact in the annals 
of Literature. The Art of Printing, invented a little earlier, became 
widely available as a means of enlightenment about the beginning 
of the sixteenth century. 

The Norman Conquest, which we take as the commencement of 
the Middle Ages for England, introduced the country, by one mighty 
stride, into the circle of continental Em-ope. Not only did it establish 
intimate relations between our island audits neighbours; but, through 
the policy which the conquerors adopted, it subjected the nation 
to both of the ruling mediaeval impulses. Feudalism, peremp- 
torily introduced, metamorphosed completely the relation between 
the people and the nobles: the recognition of the papal supre- 
macy altered not less thoroughly the position of the chmxh. 
Neither of these changes was unproductive of good in the state of 
society which then prevailed. But both of them were distasteful 
to our nation ; both of them rapidly became, in reality, injurious 
both to freedom and to knowledge ; and the opposition of opinions 
in regard to them produced most of those civil broils, in which our 
kings, our clergy, our aristocracy, and our people, played parts, and 
engaged in combinations, so shifting and so perplexing. At length, 
under the dynasty of the Tudors, the ecclesiastical shackles were 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 

cast away ; while the feudal bonds, not yet ready for unrivetting, 
began to be gradually slackened. 

In this long series of revolutions, not a step was taken without 
arousing a literary echo. They gave birth to a Literature which, 
growing up through a period of four hundred years, claims, in all 
its stages and kinds, attentive and respectful consideration. 

It speaks, when it adopts the living tongue, in a voice which, 
though rude and stammering, echoes the tones and imparts the 
meaning of our own ; it calls up before us, by an innocent necro- 
mancy, the perished world in which our forefathers lived, a world 
whose ignorance was the seed-bed of our knowledge, whose tem- 
pestuous energy cleared the foundations for our social regularity 
and refinement ; it issues from scenes which fancy loves to beautify, 
from the picturesque cloister and the dim scholastic cell, from the 
feudal castle blazing with knightly pomp, and the field decked for 
the tilt and tournament, from forests through which swept the 
storm of chase, and plains resounding vfith the shout and clang of 
battle. Those early monuments of mind possess, likewise, distin- 
guished importance in the history of letters. Imperfect in form 
and anomalous in spirit, they were the lessons of a school whose 
training it was necessary for intellect to undergo, and in which our 
modern masters of poetry and eloquence first studied the rudiments 
of their art ; and among them there are not a few which, still con- 
spicuous through the cloudy distance, are honoured by all whose 
praise is truly honourable, as illustrious memorials of triumphs 
achieved by genius over all obstacles of circumstance and time. 

5. The Literature of our Middle Ages, thus singularly and 
variously attractive, is distinguished from that of Modern Times 
by several strongly marked features. 

The most promment of these is derived from its Variety of Lan- 
guages. In its earliest stages it used three tongues ; French, Eng- 
lish, and Latin : and it continued to use always the latter two. 

Our Norman invaders were the descendants of an army of Nor- 
wegians, which, a hundred and fifty years before, had conquered a 
province of Northern France, thenceforth called Normandy. They 
were thus sprung from the same great Gothic race, another branch 
of which had sent forth the Anglo-Saxons. But they had long ago 
lost all vestiges of their pedigree. They had abandoned, almost 
universally, their own Norse tongue, and had adopted that which 
they found already used in Northern France, one of those dialects 
which sprung out of the decaying Latin. This infant language 
they had nursed and refined, till it was now ready to give expression 
to fanciful and animated poetry. In other points they had accom- 



22 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

modated themselveSj with like readiness, to the habits and institu- 
tions of their French home : they had changed nothing radically, 
but developed and improved every thing. By their fostering care 
of feudalism and of letters, as well as by other exertions, it was they 
that fii'st guided France towards beiag what she afterwards became, 
the model and instructress of mediaeval Europe. 

They took possession of England, not as colonists, like the Anglo- 
Saxons, but as military masters, like the Eomans. The Norman 
counts and their retainers sat in their castles, keeping down by armed 
power, and not without many a bloody contest, the large Saxon 
population that surrounded them. They suppressed the native 
polity by overwhelming force : they made their Norman-French 
the fashionable speech of the court and the aristocracy, and imposed 
it on the tribunals and the legislatm-e ; and their romantic literature 
quickly weaned the hearts of educated men from the ancient rudeness 
of taste. But the mass of the English people, retaining their Teu- 
tonic lineage unmixed, clung also, with the twofold obstinacy of Teu- 
tons and persecuted men, to their old ancestral tongue. The Anglo- 
Saxon language, passing through changes which we shall hereafter 
learn, yet kept its hold in substance till it was evolved into modern 
English ; and the Norman nobles, whose ancestors had volunteered 
to speak like their French subjects, were at leng-th obhged to learn 
the dialect which had been preserved among their despised English 
vassals. 

"V^Hiile, however, the Saxon-EngUsh tongue was thus gradually 
displacing the Norman-French, yet, throughout the whole course 
of the Middle Ages, in our country as elsewhere in Europe, aU the 
higher kinds of knowledge, and all the ripest fruits of reflection, 
were commmiicated, generally or always, in a Latin dress. 

In Italy, France, and Spain, where the language of the Eomans 
was spoken by the people for centuries, and where, as it de- 
cayed, it became the foundation of the modern speech, this 
practice was natm*al enough, and, for a time, may have been 
harmless. But its effects were very different in those nations 
whose native dialects were quite alien to the Latin, our own 
being one of these. The use of the dead language caused the 
position of such nations, in the earlier ages of Christendom, to be 
peculiarly unfavom-able for all improvement which has to be gained 
through literature. At fii-st, it is true, the native tongues being in 
then- infanc}'", the Latin could not but be adopted for almost all 
literary works. Afterwards, when it was less urgently needed, it 
was adhered to with such steadiness, that the Latm literatm-e of the 
Middle Ages is larger in amount, beyond calculation, than the ver- 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 23 

nacular. Nor, in our own country at least, was it tiQ the mediaeval 
period had nearly expired, that the living tongue attained such a 
degree of development, as could have qualified it for enthely super- 
seding the ancient organ of communication. For the expression of 
poetical and imagmative thought, the Enghsh Language was fully 
mature as early as the fourteenth century : as an instrument either 
of abstract speculation or of precise practical instruction, it con- 
tinued to be imperfect for several generations afterwards. 

6. This separation of languages, in the Middle Ages, was attended 
by other peculiarities, some of which are not less worthy of notice. 

In the fii'st place, there was a splittmg up of Literature into 
sections, which not only treated different kinds of matter, but were 
designed for different audiences, and used, in part, different tongues. 

The mass of our old Hterary relics may be described loosely as 
having constituted two distinct libraries. The chm-chmen had then- 
books, most of which were theological or philosophical, but which 
contained likewise almost every thing that was to be found of 
systematic thinking or solid information. All these were expressed 
in Latin : and, in unlearned times, this one fact made ail the higher 
kinds of knowledge to be the exclusive patrimony of the clerical 
profession. Overagainst the Hbrary of the ecclesiastics, anhnated 
by the spu-it of the church, stood that of the laymen, the greater 
part of which was an embodiment of the spirit of feudalism. Nearly 
every book it contained, was intended for diverting or exciting 
the nobles and their retainers. Out of its tales of warfare and ad- 
ventm-e grew up the chivalrous romances ; w^hile almost all the 
more ambitious efforts of the mediseval poetry were mainly actu- 
ated by the same sentiments, and aimed at interesting the same 
class of persons. Into this aristocratic literature, it is true, the 
influence of the chm-ch penetrated frequently ; breathing tones of 
supernatural awe into much of the chivabous poetry, or seeking to 
disseminate religious impressions through popularized versions of 
monkish traditions. But neither the clerical legend- writer, nor the 
knightly minstrel, was wont to look beyond the precincts of the 
castle-chapel and the castle-haU. The peasantry of the rural dis- 
tricts, vegetating in ignorance and neglect, and the citizens of the 
towns, slowly building themselves up in wealth and intelligence, 
were hardly ever thought of, either as beings whose character and 
destiny might fnrnish fit objects of poetical representation, or as 
classes of men amongst whom it was worth while to seek for a 
literary audience. The narrow temper, and the limited field of 
thought, which thus pervaded the vernacular literature, received a 
contractedness yet more decided from the circumstance ah'eady 



24 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

hinted at ; that, till near the close of the middle ages, our native 
tongue was neither used for prose writing nor fit to be so used 
with good effect. 

Secondly, throughout the whole of the Mediaeval Period, Litera- 
ture wanted the inestimable advantages conferred by the Art of 
Printing. This deprivation involved several remarkable conse- 
quences. First of all, books, multiplied by manuscript copies only, 
were rare, because costly : and the fewness of books was in itself suffi- 
cient to cause fewness of readers. In fact, till the very last stages 
in those times, the accomplishment of reading was unusual, except 
among the clergy. Again, even those who could read were com- 
pelled, through the difficulty of obtaining books, to derive a great 
part of their literary knowledge from oral communication; and 
it was this that made the old universities so very important. In- 
formation thus impeded could not be generally accessible even to 
the clergy themselves : and the few who attained it not only 
learned laboriously and slowly, but, with some signal exceptions, 
learned inexactly and incompletely. There followed jet another 
result. A large proportion of the literary compositions of the 
middle ages were concocted, not with any view to being read, but 
with a distinct recollection, on the part of the writers, that they 
would become known only through oral delivery. Very many of 
them have peculiarities, which cannot be accounted for otherwise 
than by such an expectation. This is the case with not a few of the 
philosophical and theological works. Above aU, the fact is a clue 
to much that is most strikingly distinctive in the character of the 
Mediaeval Poetry : it is the main reason why irregularities of form 
prevailed so long after they might have been expected to disappear ; 
and it shows, in great part, why an animation of manner was 
naturally and generally attained, after which modern art has 
usually striven in vain. 

7. Emerging from the glimmer and gloom which alternate in the 
Middle Ages, we now cast our eyes along the illuminated vista of 
Modern History. The eye is dazzled by a multipHcity of striking 
objects, among which it is not always easy to distinguish those 
that most actively shaped and coloured the literatm-e of the times. 

We may, however, understand the facts in part; and we are 
beginning to prepare ourselves for so doing, when we contrast the 
Modern Literature with the Mediaeval, in respect of those circum- 
stances which have been observed to" characterize the latter. 

Ever since the close of the middle ages, the Printing-Press has 
been incessantly at work among us. In the very earliest time 
of its general use, it began to metamorphose the whole character 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 

of Literature; and the transformation has assumed new aspects, 
with each new enlargement of the resources of the art. KjqowI- 
edge, and eloquence, and poetry, began equally to aspire to ex- 
actness and symmetry, as soon as the abundance of books sub- 
jected them to close and constant scrutiny: and all departments of 
letters have been actuated by a temper more and more philanthropic 
and expansive, as they became able to command a wider and wider 
audience. Those barriers of Language also have vanished, which 
once rose up between the teachers and the taught. The Living 
Tongue of the nation, ripe for all uses in the beguming of the six- 
teenth centmy, diffused speedily the records of Divine Wisdom, 
and has ever since been ahnost the only organ of communication 
dreamt of by our men of letters. 

Literature, thus put ui possession of adequate instruments, has 
also had new laws to obey, and new truths to impart, and new 
varieties of sentiment and imagination to represent. At once 
prompting the times and interpreting them, and performing both 
functions with an energy which she could never before have at- 
tained, she has stood in the midst of a world which, from the 
very beginning of the Modern Period, was emancipatmg itself from 
the most powerful of the mediaeval influences. 

As we glance over the Modern History of our nation, we see 
the feudal power of the nobles waning before the concentrated 
streng-tli of the cro^^m : the monarchy, absolute while its sceptre 
was grasped fii-mly by the house of Tudor, is paralyzed by the 
haughty and obstinate imprudence of the Stuarts ; and at length, 
after a struggle of two generations, om' polity is moulded, at the 
Revolution, into the constitutional form which it now wears. 

It is much less easy to gather, into one result, that extraordinary 
series of changes, ecclesiastical, religious, and moral, which opened 
with the Protestant Reformation. Theological doctrine has been 
purified : the relations of the church to the nation, in all the diverse 
aspects in which they have been regarded, are at least freed from 
those complications, which made the Romish hierarchy so dan- 
gerous in the latter part of the middle ages : and there has been 
won, slowly and painfuUy, a universal recognition of man's in- 
alienable right to tMnk on things sacred, with no responsibility but 
to the Omniscient Searcher of Consciences. It would be rash to 
say that these vast ameKorations of system have worked all the 
good, which a sanguine temperament might have hoped to see 
issumg from them. But, that the moral and religious character of 
society in our country has, as a whole, been incalculably improved 
by the Reformation, seems to be as certain as it is, that, mthout 

B 



26 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

that great revolution, neither our constitutional liberties nor our 
intellectual culture could have gained anything approaching to 
the development in which we now rejoice. 

8. The Modern History of English Literature will, when we 
examine its details, be distributed into several successive Periods. 
For two of these, exact attention may here be bespoken, as eras 
especially important in the progTess of our national enlightCDment. 
The one embraces the hundred years that opened with the ac- 
cession of Queen Elizabeth : the other is that in which we our- 
selves live, and which may be dated from the beginning of the 
nineteenth century. 

Each of these two periods has given to our language various and 
abundant stores of intellectual wealth. Each of them, likewise, if 
compared vdth the times before it, wiU be found to have witnessed 
an immense increase in the diffusion of knowledge through the 
nation. Each of them, yet again, presents itself as an age in which 
intellect has been singularly active in regard to objects not lying 
immediately vv-ithin the province of letters : and each is thus an 
instructive illustration of a truth which we cannot too often call to 
mind; namely, that there always exists, though sometimes but 
dimly perceptible, an intimate connexion between literature and aU 
the elements of society. 

When we allow our studies to prompt reflections such as these, 
we put them to one of their most profitable uses ; to a use, indeed, 
that cannot be served by our reading of any Literary Work, so 
long as Vv^e regard it without reference to the time and circumstances 
in which it came to light. 

In our perusal, doubtless, of a history or a philosophical treatise, 
of an august epic or a moving tragedy, we may, without looking 
thus widely abroad, enrich our minds with new truths and elevating 
contemplations, or with fancies and emotions that kindle and feed 
the flame of virtuous aspiration. Nor wfll the lighter kinds of read- 
ing be always barren of good, if the books read are not positively 
mischievous. Literature does in itself tend towards moral improve- 
ment, however frequently the tendency may be counteracted by 
the evil hearts of ourselves or our instructors. It wars against the 
impulses of thoughtlessness and sensualism. The present weighs 
us down heavily towards the earth : we are lifted upwards, though 
it may be but for a short way, by all that incites us to meditate on 
the past and the future. He to whom a book has hinted a striking 
general truth, or communicated a vivid poetical image, has inhaled 
a draught of that finer air, which every rational and accountable 
creature should always desire to breathe. By kuowing more 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 27 

clearly, or by imagining more actively, he has b6en prepared for 
feeling more purely, for wishing more nobly, perhaps also for 
resolving more firmly. 

A gracious spirit o'er the earth presides, 
And o'er the heart of man : invisibly 
It comes, to works of unreproved delight, 
And tendency benign, directing those 
Who care not, know not, think not, what they do ! 

Yet the lessons to be learned from Literature have not been 
received either completely or altogether safely, until we have accus- 
tomed ourselves to think of all its monuments in their Historical 
Kelations. 

The most illustrious masterpieces of genius are not justly valued, 
unless we know both the facHities which encouraged them and the 
obstacles which they overcame. The most energetic achievements 
of the seekers after truth are not fitly honoured, unless we have 
marked the errors which they rooted out, and the extent to which 
theu' teaching was effectual. The most sublime of the moral 
representations exhibited in eloquence and poetry do not exert their 
whole power over us, unless we have qualified ourselves for con- 
ceiving the character of the external impulses by which they were 
affected, and for noting how far they were able to act on the minds 
of their own and following times. It is further true, that, when 
the historical view is taken, a real importance is found to be pos- 
sessed by many literary effusions, so unsubstantial as not to de- 
serve permanent celebrity, or so faulty in their ethics that they 
ought not to meet the eye of youthful students. Such productions 
often require and reward a passing notice ; as being sometimes symp- 
toms indicating^ and sometimes causes producing, degeneracy of 
taste or of morals, in the age that gave them birth, or in the class 
of readers for which they were framed. 

Thoughts yet more comprehensive and more serious dawn and 
brighten on us, when we regard the History of English Literature 
as a whole ; when we reflect on it as a magnificent series of events, 
concurrent with those wonderful changes that have successively 
impressed themselves on the face of society. We then perceive, 
in one of its most signal instances, this great truth ; that, notwith- 
standing all shortcomings and aberrations, the progress of literary 
culture keeps pace, partly as cause partly as effect, with the pro- 
gress of the nations of the earth towards that renovation of man's 
spiritual nature, which Christianity has been divinely appointed to 
create. Nor, when this reflection has arisen, can it fail to be accom- 
panied by others. We are reminded that Literature is necessarily 



28 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 

a moral power, a power modifying tlie character of mankind, and 
aiding in the determination of their position now and hereafter : a 
solemn and widely-reaching truth, which ought also to teach every 
individual among us, how unspeakably important it is, that the 
books we read be wisely selected. We are reminded, also, that the 
capacities which bestow this responsible function on the records of 
intellect, are conferred by that Omnipotent Father of our spirits, 
who rules the thoughts and acts of aU His intelligent creatures : 
and this thought, the most elevated of all which our studies suggest, 
cannot but inspire humble and reverential gratitude for the good- 
ness of Him, from whom we receive knowledge, and intellectual 
enjoyment, and life, and aU things. 



In the preparation of this little Manual of Literary History, it has been a 
duty to collect facts and opinions from many and various sources ; and it 
would be a duty not less pleasant to cite these often and thankfully. But, 
in such a volume, a large array of notes and references would be both incon- 
venient and needless. 

Some of the most valuable of those works, in which particular sections of 
our Literature are treated either historically or critically, will be named 
in the text, or noted as furnishiag us with instructive quotations. 

The History of EngHsh Literature, in all its periods and kinds, is given, 
with many specimens and valuable criticisms, in two excellent text-books, 
composed for popular use : Chambers' " Cyclopaedia of English Literature," 
2 volumes, large 8vo, 1843-44:; and Craik's "Sketches of the History of 
Literature and Learning in England," 6 volumes ISmo, 1844-45. These, 
in fact, are as yet the only works, of any class, in which the whole field is 
minutely surveyed. An acquaintance with them will do very much towards 
filling up in the student's mind, profitably and agreeably, the elementary 
outline here presented to him. 



PAET FIEST. 



LITERATURE IN THE DARK AND MIDDLE AGES. 
A.D. 449— A. D. 1509. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ANGLO-SAXOK TIMES. 

A.D. 449— A.D. 1066. 

SECTION FIRST t LITERATURE IN THE CELTIC AND LATIN 
TONGUES. 

1. The Fom- Languages used in Literature — Latin and Anglo-Saxon — The 
Two Celtic Tongues— The Welsh— The Irish and Scottish Graelic— Celtic 
Literature. 2. Gaelic Literature — Irish Metrical Eelics and Prose 
Chronicles — Scottish Metrical Eelics — Ossian. — 3. Welsh Literature — 
The Triads — Supposed Fragments of the Bards — Eomances — Legends of 
King Arthur. — Latii* Literature. 4. Introduction of Christianity — 
Saint Patrick — Columha — Augustine. — 5. Learned Men — Superiority of 
Ireland — Intercourse Avith the Continent — The Anglo-Saxons in Eome. — 
6. The Four Great Names of the Times — Alcuin and Erigena — Bede and 
Alfred — Latin Learning among the Anglo-Saxons. 

1. During the Anglo-Saxon times, four languages were used for 
literary communication in the British islands. 

Latin was the organ of the church and of learning, here as else- 
where, throughout the Dark and Middle Ages. Accordingly, tiU 
we reach Modem Times, we cannot altogether overlook the litera- 
ture which was expressed in it, if we would acquire a full idea of 
the progress of intellectual culture. 

• Of the other three languages, all of which were national and 
living, one was the Anglo-Saxon, the monuments of which, with its 



30 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

history, will soon call for close scrutiny. The second and third 
were Celtic tongues, spoken by the communities of that race who still 
possessed large parts of the coujitry. These, with their scanty stock 
of literary remains, must receive some attention at present ; although 
they will be left out of view when we pass to those later periods, 
in which the Germanic population became decisively predominant 
in Great Britain. 

The first of the Celtic tongues has oftenest been called Erse or 
Gaelic. It was common, with dialectic varieties only, to the Celts 
of Ireland and those of Scotland. Ireland was wholly occupied by 
tribes of this stock, except some small Norse settlements on the 
seacoast. Whether Scotland, beyond the Forth and Clyde, was so 
likewise, is a question not to be answered, until it shaU have been 
determined whether the Picts, the early inhabitants of the eastern 
Scottish counties, were Celts or Goths. It is certam, at least, that, 
either before the Norman Conquest or soon afterwards, the Celtic 
Scots were confined within limits corresponding nearly with those 
which now bound their descendants. 

And here, while we are looking beyond the Anglo-Saxon fron- 
tiers, it is to be noted that the Eomans did not conquer any part 
of Ireland, and that their hold on the north and west of Scotland 
had been so slight as to leave hardly any appreciable effects. 

The second Celtic tongue, that of the Cymrians or. ancient 
Britons, has been preserved in the Welsh. Its seats, during the 
Anglo-Saxon period, were the pro^dnces which were still held by 
Britons, quite independent or unperfectly subdued. Accordingly, 
it was universally used in Wales, and, for a long time, in Cornwall ; 
and, for several centuries, it kept its hold in the petty kingdoms of 
Cumbria and Strathclyde, extending to the Clyde from the middle 
of Lancashu'C, and thus covering the north-west of England and 
the south-west of Scotland. 

We have not time to study the history of GaUoway, situated in 
Strathclyde, but long occupied chiefly by GaeHc Celts ; nor that of 
the Hebrides and other islands, disputed for centuries between the 
Gaelic Celts and the Northmen. 

CELTIC LITERATURE. 

2. Of the two Celtic nations whose living tongue was the Erse, 
Ireland had immeasurably the advantage, in the success with which 
its vernacular speech was applied to uses that may be called 
literar}^. 

To others must be left the task of estimating rightly the genuine- 



CELTIC LITERATURE. 31 

ness, as well as the poetical merit, of the ancient Metrical relics 
still extant in th-e Irish language. They consist of many Bardic 
Songs and Historical Legends. Some of these are asserted to be 
much older than the nmth century, the close of which was the date 
of the legendary collection called the Psalter of Cashel, still surviv- 
ing, and probably in its genuine shape. Competent critics have ad- 
mitted the great historical value of the Prose Chronicles, preserved 
to this day, which grew up, by the successive additions of many gen- 
erations, in the monasteries of the " Island of Samts." In the form 
in which these now exist, none of them seems to be so ancient as 
the Annals compiled by Tigernach, who died in the close of the 
eleventh century ; but it is believed, on good grounds, that, both 
in this work, in the Annals of the Five Masters, and in several such 
local records as the Annals of Ulster and InnisfaEen, there are 
incorporated the substance, and often the very words, of many 
chronicles composed much earlier. It does not thus appear rash 
to say, that the Irish possess contemporary histories of theh comitry, 
written in the language of the people, and authentic though meagre, 
from the fifth century or little later. No other nation of modern 
Europe is able to make a similar boast. 

Nor does it appear that the Scottish Celts can point to literary 
monuments of any kiad, ha\dng an antiquity at all comparable to 
this. Indeed then' social position was, in all respects, much below 
that of then' western kinsmen. All the earliest relics of their 
language are Metrical. Such is the Albanic Duan, an historical 
poem, described as possessiag a bardic and legendary character, and 
said to belong to the eleventh centmy. The poems which bear the 
name of Ossian are professedly celebrations, by an eye-witness, of 
events occurring in the thhd century. But, though we were to 
throw out of view the modem patchwork which disguises the orig- 
inal from the Enghsh reader, and though likewise we should hesitate 
to assert positively that the Fmgalic tales were really borrowed from 
Ireland, it is still impossible to satisfy oneself that any pieces, now 
exhibited as the groundwork of the poems, have a just claim to so 
remote an origin. All such productions seem to be merely attempts, 
some of them exceedingly imaginative and sphited, to invest with 
poetical and mythical glory the legends of generations which had 
passed away long before the poet's tune. 

3. The literature of the Cymric Celts becomes an object of lively 
interest, tln-ough our familiarity with cu'cumstances relating to it, 
which occuri'ed in the Middle Ages. We seek eagerly, among the 
fallen fragments of British poetry and history, for the foundations 
of the magnificent legend, which, in the days of chivalry, was built 



32 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

up to immortalize King Arthur and his Knights of the Eound 
Table, We desire to trace upward, till the dim distance hides it, the 
memory of those Welsh bards, who, in the decay of their country, 
were the champions, and at last the martyrs, of national freedom. 

Ancient Welsh writings, stiU extant, are described as dealing 
intelligently, both in prose and verse, with a wonderful variety of 
topics. It is not universally admitted that any of these were com- 
posed earlier than the twelfth century : but it is probable, from 
evidence both external and internal, that some are much older. 

There is a marked character of primitive antiquity in the singular 
pieces called the Triads. They are collections of historical facts, 
maxims ethical and legal, mythological doctrines and traditions, 
and rules for the structure of verse : all of them are expressed with 
extreme brevity, and regularly disposed in groups of three. Among 
the Welsh Metrical pieces, those of the times succeeding the Nor- 
man Conquest are very numerous ; but a few are to be found which 
have plausibly been assigned to celebrated bards of the sixth century. 
It is pleasant to believe that the great Taliessin still speaks to us from 
his grave ; that we read the poems of Aneurin, the heroic and unfor- 
tunate prince of Cumbria and Strathclyde ; and that, in the verses of 
Merdhin the Caledonian, we possess relics of the sage and poet, whom 
the reverence of later ages transformed into the enchanter Merlin. 
Theromantic impression is strengthenedby the earnest simphcity, and 
the spirit of pathetic lamentation, with which some of these hreg- 
ular lyrics chant the calamities of the Cymrians. There exists like- 
wise a considerable stock of old Welsh Romances, the most remark- 
able of which are contained in the series called the Mabmogi or 
Tales of Youth. Most of those that have been translated into 
English, such as Peredur and the Lady of the Fountam, are merely ' 
versions from some of the finest of the Norman-French romances. 
But several others, as the stories of Prmce Pwyll and Math the 
Enchanter, are very similar to the older Norse sagas ; and these, if 
not very ancient in their present shape, must have sprung from the 
traditions of an exceedingly rude and early generation. 

Frequently, both in the triads and in the bardic songs, allusions 
are made to the heroic Arthur. A Cymric prince of Wales or 
Cumbria, surrounded by patriotic warriors like himself, and val- 
iantly resisting the alien enemies of his country, had, in many a 
battle, triumphantly carried the Dragon-flag of his race into the 
heart of the hosts amidst whom floated the Pale Horse of the Saxon 
standard. At length, we are told, he died by domestic treason ; 
and the flower of the British nobles perished with him. His name 
was cherished with melancholy pride, and his heroism magnified 



LATIN LITERATURE. 33 

with increasingly fond exaggeration, alike among those Welsh 
Britons who stUl guarded the valleys of Snowdon, and among those 
■who, having sought a foreign seat of liberty, wandered in exile on 
the banks of the Loire. Poetic chroniclers among the Cymrians of 
Brittany gradually wove the scattered and embellished traditions 
into a legendary British history : this Armoric compilation was 
used, perhaps with traditions also that had lingered in Wales, by 
Greoffi:ey of Monmouth, in the tweKth century, as the groundwork 
of a Latin historical work ; and then the poets of chivalry, allured 
by the beauty and pathos of the tale, made it for ages the centre of 
the most animated pictures of romance. 

LATIN LITERATURE. 

4. The Latin learning of the Dark Ages, though seldom extensive 
or exact, and always confined to a very small circle of students, 
formed a point of contact between the instructed men of the several 
races. Its cultivation arose out of the introduction of Christianity ; 
and its most valued uses were those which related to the faith and 
the church. 

It is doubtful at what time the seeds of spiritual life were first 
scattered on om- island shores. Mhacles were said to have attested 
the preaching of Joseph of Arimathea in England ; and a cave 
which still looks, from the cliffs of Fifeshu-e, over the eastern sea, 
was celebrated as the oratory whence, towards the close of the fourth 
century, the Greek Saint Regulus went forth to christianize the 
Picts. It is better proved that there were British converts among 
the martyrs in the persecution of Diocletian ; and that, not much 
later. Irishmen, such as the heretical Pelagius, were to be found in 
the continental churches. But any progress which the true faith 
may have made among our forefathers, in the Eoman times, seems 
to have been arrested by the anarchy and bloodshed which every- 
where attended the Germanic invasions. 

Ireland, in which Saint Patrick's teaching is said to have begun 
a few years before the middle of the fifth century, certainly led the 
way to the general acceptance of Christianity ; and the conversion 
of Britam was first attempted by Irish missionaries. Among these. 
Saint Columba is especially named, as having, in the latter half of 
the sixth century, founded his celebrated monastery in the sacred 
isle of lona, from which he and his disciples and successors extended 
their preaching in the west and north of Scotland. About the end 
of the same century. Saint Augustine arrived in England, sent 
by Pope Gregory, who, according to the beautiful story told 

b2 



34 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

by the old historians, had been deeply moved by seeing Anglo- 
Saxon youths exposed in the slave-market of Rome. For several 
generations before the Norman conquest, Great Britain and Ireland 
were, in name at least, universally Christian. 

5. Almost all who then cultivated Latin learning were ecclesi- 
astics ; and by far the larger number of those who became eminent 
in it were unquestionably Irishmen. Most of them are described 
by old writers as Scots : but this name was first applied to the Irish 
Celts, and Avas not transferred to the inhabitants of North Britain 
till after the Dark Ages. Indeed, amidst the bloodshed and wan- 
derings which accompanied and followed the faU of the Roman 
Empire, Ireland was a place of rest and safety, both to fugitives 
from the continent, and to others from England. Among the latter 
is named Gildas the Wise, a brother of the British bard Aneurin, 
and the supposed writer of a treatise " on the Destruction of Britain," 
which, if it were undoubtedly genuine, would be the oldest of oui* 
Latin histories. Thus adding the acquisitions of other countries to 
its own, the Green Isle contained, for more centuries than one, 
a larger amount of learning than all that could have been collected 
from the rest of Europe ; and its scholars often found other sanc- 
tuaries among the storm-defended rocks of the Hebrides. 

It is a fact well deserving the attentio^ of the student, that the 
communication between distant countries, thus arising out of the 
miseries incident to troublous times, received a new unpulse as each 
country adopted the Christian faith. All were thenceforth mem- 
bers of one ecclesiastical community; and each maintained con- 
nexion, both with the rest, and with Rome the common centre. It 
does indeed appear, that the Anglo-Saxon church was much less 
dependent on the papal see than many others, in respect both of 
government and of doctrine : yet, from an early date, its intercourse 
with Italy was close and constant. Pilgrimages to Rome were exceed- 
ingly common. Two, if not more, of the Saxon prmces assumed the 
cowl, and were buried in the precincts of the church of Saint Peter : 
among the hospices for the reception of pilgrims, which were built 
around the venerated spot, that of our countrymen was one of the 
earliest : and the Anglo-Saxon fraternity, (technically described in 
the old books as a school,) received corporate privileges from the 
popes, and is honourably commemorated as having repeatedly given 
valiant aid in the defence of the city. Alfred is said to have sent 
alms every, year to Rome, receiving, in return, not only relics, but 
other and more valuable gifts : and he invited foreign ecclesiastics 
to settle in his kingdom, and assist in his attempts to revive learn- 
ing among the native clergy. Religious zeal thus produced an 



LATIN LITERATURE. 35 

interchange of knowledge, which, in times almost without commerce, 
and in a state of society making travelling difficult and dangerous, 
could not otherwise have taken place. 

6. Thus, though our nation lost some of her best and ablest sons, 
through the frequent disturbances which chequered her history, she 
gained other instructors, whose services counterbalanced the loss. 

Many of our native churchmen, it is true, lived chiefly abroad ; 
but our churches and schools received very many foreigners. So, 
in the seventh century, the most active promoters of erudition 
among the Anglo-Saxons were the Abbot Adrian, an African sent 
from Naples, and the Archbishop Theodore, a native of Tarsus who 
had been a monk at Eome. So, likewise, on the other hand, two of 
the four men, whose names hold decisively the highest places in the 
literary roll of our ancient ancestry, gave the benefit of their talents 
to foreign lands. England retained Bede and Alfred; but she lost 
Alcuin and Erigena. Alcuin, perhaps an Irishman, though educated 
at York, taught and wrote in the dominions of Charlemagne, 
Joannes Scotuj Erigena, again, remarkable alike as almost the only 
learned layman of the Dark Ages, and as the only thinker who 
then attained original views in speculative philosophy, was almost 
certainly a native of Ireland. But France was the principal scene 
of his labours ; and neither his invitation to England by Alfred, nor 
his tragical death in that country, can be held as any thing more 
than doubtful traditions. 

Among those native ecclesiastics who remained in England, three 
men only can here be named as eminent' for success in Latm studies. 
The oldest of these was Bishop Aldhelm, a southern Saxon, whose 
zeal for the enlightenment of the people gives lihn a better title to 
fame, than the specimens which have been produced from his Latin 
prose and verse ; another was Asser, a Welsh monk of St David's, 
the friend, and teacher, and affectionate biographer of the illustrious 
Alfred ; and greater than any of these was the Northumbrian Beda, 
whose name receives by immemorial custom an epithet expressing 
1. 672. \ well-merited reverence. The Venerable Bede, entering in 
d. 735. I ]3oyhood the monastery of Wearmouth, m his native district, 
spent his whole manhood in the neighbouring cells of Jarrow, zeal- 
ously occupied in ecclesiastical and historical research. His extant 
writings are allowed to exhibit an extent of classical scholarship, 
and a correctness of taste, surprising for his time : and his investi- 
gations into the antiquities of the country gave birth to his Eccle- 
siastical History of England, which is to this day a leading authority, 
not for the annals of the church only, but for all the public events 
that occurred in the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period. 



36 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

The Anglo-Saxon names which have thus been set down are 
very few: and the nation really did not possess, in any period, 
many men who at all deserved to be described as learned. From 
the age of Bede to that of Alfred, we encounter hardly any evidence 
of so much as moderate erudition ; and this great man had to 
undertake a task, which really amounted to something very like 
the instruction of a people altogether ignorant. We shall learn 
immediately that the method which he and his assistants adopted, 
for enlightening their countrymen, led them to promote Latin learn- 
ing to no further extent, than that which was absolutely required 
for enabling them to master some of the most important items of 
the knowledge recorded in the dead language. Their leading aim 
was the cultivation of their mother-tongue, and the diffusion of 
practical information through its means. 

It is also a fact to be remembered, that the classical learning of 
Alfred's age, such as it was, did not long survive its founder. In 
this respect, not less than in others, the last few generations of the 
Anglo -Saxon period exhibit unequivocal symptoms of decay. • 

Some of the causes which brought about this decline, should be 
kept in our view while we proceed to survey the vernacular litera- 
ture of the nation. Hardly more than barbarians when they landed 
in our island, the Anglo-Saxons were phecked in their progress to- 
wards civilisation by their continual wars against the Britons, and 
stm more by their own divisions and contests. At length, when 
the chiefs of one of their petty states had been recognised as kings 
of Saxon England, the polity thus established was shaken to its 
foundations, by the long struggle they had to maintain against their 
Gothic kinsmen from Scandinavia. The conquest of the country by 
the Danish prince Canute presaged the ease with which the race 
was to be subdued by William of Normandy. 



THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 37 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 
A. D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

SECTION SECOND : LITERATURE IN THE ANGLO-SAXON TONGUE. 

1. Usual Course of Early National Literature. — 2. Peculiar Character of 
Anglo-Saxon Literature — Its Causes. — Poetry. 3. National and Histor- 
ical Poems — The Tale of Beowulf— Other Specimens. — 4. Poems Didac- 
tic and Eeligious — Extant Specimens — Csedmon's Life and Poems. — 5. Ver- 
sification and Style of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. — Pkose. 6. The Living Lan- 
guage freely used — Translations from the Scriptures. — 7. Original Com- 
position — Homilies ^ Miscellaneous Works — The Saxon Chronicle. — 
8. King Alfred — His Works — His Character. 

1. The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons has a very peculiar charac- 
ter ; and that because it was formed by a process which was not 
only unusual, but also in certain respects artificial. 

The natural development of literary cultivation among a people 
commonly takes place in some such manner as this. 

The earliest effusions that appear are metrical in form, and almost 
always historical in matter. The effects, too, which they are designed 
to produce on those to whom they are addressed are complex : for, 
besides striving to cause the imaginative pleasure which is charac- 
teristic of poetry, they aim also at that communication of instruction, 
and that passionate excitement, which in more refined times are 
sought chiefly through the medium of prose. The artless verses 
which constitute this infant literature, have, in most countries, been 
composed without being written down. Further progress is difiicult, 
if not impossible, until the preservation of literary works by writing 
has long given opportunity for the attentive and critical study of 
them. Such study leads to the next great step in improvement, 
which is the use of prose, that is, language not metrically modu- 
lated. It is adopted in those literary efforts which aim principally 
at the imparting or preserving of knowledge, or at such other prac- 
tical purposes as are least akin to the poetical : and it is only when 



38 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

prose has come into free use, that the several kinds of composition 
begin to be separated according to their diversity of purpose. So 
long, indeed, as prose writing is unknown, history itself is not faith- 
ful to its distinctive function of truly recording acts and events ; 
and every thing like philosophy, or the systematic inferring of prin- 
ciples from facts, is of course unattainable. But the setting forth 
of abstract truths is hardly ever recognised as the proper duty of 
any literary work, until enlightenment has proceeded very far : 
histories long continue to be the principal works composed in prose : 
and poems, whether they are in form narrative, dramatic, or l5rrical, 
are imaginative and impassioned in tone, for ages before they be- 
come essentially meditative or didactic. 

Such has been, in substance, the early progress of literature in 
almost all the nations of Christendom. But such was not its early 
progress among our Germanic ancestors. 

2. The Anglo-Saxons neglected almost utterly those ancestral 
legends, which Avere at once the poetry and the history of their con- 
temporaries. They avoided, indeed, almost always (at least in such 
relics as survive to us) the choice of national themes for poetry, 
preferring to poetize ethical reflections, and religious doctrines or 
narratives. Their instructed men wrote easily in prose, at a time 
when other living languages were still entangled in the trammels of 
verse : they embodied, in rough but lucid phrases, practical in- 
formation and every-day shrewdness, while the continental Teuton^ 
were treating literature merely as an instrument for the expression 
of impassioned fancy : and many of them deliberately renounced 
the ambition of originality, to execute, for the good of their people, 
industrious translaticms from the classics, the fathers of the church, 
and the Holy Scriptures. 

Our progenitors thus constructed, in their native tongue, a series 
of literary monuments, to which a parallel is altogether wanting, 
not only among the nations of the same period, but among aU others 
in the same stage of social advancement. 

Their poetical relics, it must be allowed, are not the most attrac- 
tive we can find. They want alike the pathos which inspkes the 
bardic songs of the vanquished Cymrians, the exulting imagination 
which reigns in the sagas of the North, and the dramatic life which 
animates, everywhere, the legendary tales that light up the dim be- 
ginnings of a people's history. Their prose works, too, when they 
are in substance original, are plainly no more than strainings at a 
task, which could not be adequately performed with the language 
or the knowledge they possessed. But the literature which thus 
neither excites by images of barbarism, nor soothes by the refine- 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 39 

merits of art, possesses legitimate claims to respect and admiration, 
in the elevation and far-sightedness of the aims which determined 
its character, and in the calm strength, and the moral and religious 
purity, which, singly or united, breathe through its principal relics. 

The truth is, that both the verse and the prose of almost all our 
Anglo-Saxon remains differed, both in origin and in purpose, from 
the specimens of a similar age that have come down to us from other 
nations. They were produced by the best -instructed men of the 
times, who desired, by means of their works, to improve the social 
condition of their country, and to eanoble the character and senti- 
ments of their countrymen. 

The vernacular poetry, with very little exception, was not framed 
either by genealogical bards, or by wandering minstrels ; it was not 
designed either to cherish national pride, or to excite the fancy, or 
to whet the barbaric thirst for blood. Some such poetry, the only 
kind that was known among their neighbours, they unquestionably 
had. Specimens of it have reached us ; but they are so few, and 
wear so little of a national air, that the stock to which they be- 
longed must have been very small, and calculated to produce very 
trifling effects. 

The prose, again, communicated, to the people at large, knowl- 
edge which elsewhere its possessors would have sealed up in a dead 
language, to be transmitted only from convent to convent, or from 
the ecclesiastical pupils of one school to those of another. 

Altogether, the Anglo-Saxon literature is strongly and interest- 
ingly symptomatic of that practical coolness of temper, and that in- 
clination to look exclusively towards the present and the future, 
which marked the whole history of the race, and which one is half- 
tempted to consider as foreshowing the spirit that was to bear 
rule among their modern offsprmg. 

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. 

3. The general idea which we have thus gained of the literature 
of our mother-tongue, will be made more distinct by a few ex- 
amples, the metrical monuments being studied first, and the prose 
afterwards. 

We possess three Historical Poems, all of which record Teutonic 
recollections of the continent, and must have been composed before 
the beginning of the emigrations to England. The Gleeman's 
Song, a piece very valuable to the antiquary, proves its remote 
origin both by the character of its geographical traditions, and by 
its bare and prosaic rudeness. The poem on the Battle of Fins- 



40 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

burgh relates, with great animation, a story of exterminating 
slaughter, the place of which is doubtful, but certainly must be 
sought somewhere among the continental seats of the Anglo- 
Saxons. The Tale of Beowulf, a legend containiug more than 
six thousand lines, is not only the most bulky, but by far the most 
interesting of the group. It presents a highly spirited and pic- 
turesque series of semi-romantic scenes, curiously illustrative of the 
early Gothic manners and superstitions. It is essentially a Norse 
saga; and its scene appears to be laid enthely in Scandinavia. 
Its hero, a Danish prince, goes out, somewhat in the guise of a 
knight-errant, on two adventures. In the first of these he slays 
a fiendish cannibal, encountering supernatural perils both on land 
and in the bosom of the waters, and overcoming them by super- 
human strength and enchanted weapons : ui the other, he sacri- 
fices his own life in destroying a frightful earthdrake or dragon. 

It may be instructive to note, in passing, how common are stories 
like these in all early poetiy, and how naturally they spring out of 
the real occurrences of primitive history. When, after a contest 
between two rude tribes, the conquerors, wanting authentic records, 
have had time to forget the particular facts, they willingly exagge- 
rate the glory of their victory, by imagining theh vanquished 
enemies to have possessed extraordinary strength or to have been 
assisted by superhuman protectors. Thus arise tales of giants, and 
such inventions as those which adorn the first of Beowulf's exploits. 
So, likewise, the earliest occupants of uninhabited tracts, even in 
our own country, may have had to destroy wild animals, which to 
them were actually not less formidable than the monsters described 
so frightfully in the legends. Hardy woodsmen, who extu'pated the 
noxious reptiles of some neighbom'ing swamp, were probably the 
originals of that long train of dragon-killers, which, (to say nothing 
of the classical Hercules,) begins with our Anglo-Saxon poem, and 
attends us through the series of the chivalrous romances. The 
slaying of wild boars is commemorated, as a useful service to the 
community, in our old historical memorials as well as in the stories 
of knight-errantry : and the fierce bisons, vfhose skeletons are still 
sometimes disinterred from our soil, were enemies dangerous enough 
to give importance to such adventm-es, as that in which the " dun 
cow " is said to have been destroyed by the famous knight Guy of 
Warwick. 

That the continental memorials just described were preserved by 
the minstrels of England, is proved by some featm-es, both of 
language and of manners, which show them, especially the Beowulf, 
to have undergone the kind of changes naturally taking place in 



ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. 41 

poems orally transmitted from age to age. But no other works of 
their class and date have been preserved. 

Poems celebrating public or warlike events, if called forth at all 
by the wars with the Britons or with the earlier Danish invaders, 
have not reached our hands. Om- only other specimens of the 
kind belong to the tenth century, which gives us several. One 
is a vigorous song on Athelstan's victory over the Northmen, 
Britons, and Scots, at Brunanburgh; there are two pieces com- 
memorating the coronation and death of Edgar ; and the finest of 
all is the spirited and picturesque poem which relates the fall of the 
brave chief Byrthnoth at Maldon, in battle against a powerful army 
of Danes and Norwegians. 

4. Meanwhile, from the time when the tumult and warfare of 
the colonization had subsided, the language received numerous 
metrical contributions of a different class. The distant echoes of 
the heathen past had almost died away, lingering doubtless among 
the superstitions of the people, but never heard in the literature 
which then arose, and which spoke with the gentler voice of Chris- 
tianity and infant civilisation. The poems in which these senti- 
ments found vent belong to the seventh, ninth, and tenth centuries. 
A very large proportion of them are religious ; and ail are more or 
less reflective. Even the many which are professedly transla- 
tions treat their originals with a freedom, which leaves them a 
claim to be regarded as in part invented. 

Among them are metrical lives of saints, prayers, hymns, and 
paraphrases of Scripture ; and there is at least one poem, the Tale 
of Judith, in which incidents from the bible-history are woven into 
a narrative poem strikingly fanciful. In the ethical class, we find 
such works as the Allegory of the Phoenix (expanded from a Latin 
model), a quaintly fine poem on Death, and an Address by the 
Departed Soul to the Body, which was repeatedly unitated in sub- 
sequent times. / 

The most remarkable of the religious poems are those attributed 
d. ab. ) to the Northumbrian Csedmon, who lived in the latter part 
680- y of the seventh century. His poetic vein came to light in a 
singular fashion. Employed as a servant of the monastery at 
Whitby, he passed his best days without instruction, nom-ishing the 
love of sacred song, but unable to give expression to the images 
and feelings that possessed him, or even to find voice for chanting 
hymns or ballads composed by others. Mortified, one evening, by 
having to remain silent in a company of rustics more musical or 
less modest, he retreated to his humble lodging in the abbey-grange. 
In his troubled sleep, a stranger, appearing to him, commanded, 



42 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

without admitting his excuses, that he should sing of the Beginning 
of Created Things. Original verses flowed to the di'eamer's tongue, 
were remembered when he awoke, and recited with a new-bom 
confidence. The natural ebullition of untutored fancy was hailed 
as a miracle ; and Csedmon, receiving some education, was en- 
rolled among the monks, and spent the remainder of his life in 
writing religious poetry. His dream-song, preserved by Alfred, is 
more coherent than Coleridge's verses of similar origin, but has 
none of their fanciful richness. 

Other works of his, which we stUl possess, though probably 
neither in perfect purity nor at all complete, are inspired by a 
noble tone of solemn imagination. Their bulk in all is nearly 
equal to half of the Paradise Lost ; to which some parts of them 
bear, not only in story but in thought, such a distant resemblance, 
as may exist between the fruits of lofty genius guided by know- 
ledge and art, and those of genius allied in character if not in 
degree, but lamed by ignorance and want of constructive skUl. 
They are narrative poems, handling scriptural events, but using 
the original in most places as loosely as it is used, by Milton. 
Perhaps they were intended to make up one consecutive story : 
but, as we have them, they present several ob\dous blanks, and 
may most conveniently be regarded as falling into no more than 
two parts, the one dealing with events from the Old Testament, and 
the other taking up the New. 

The First Part, beginning with the Expulsion of the Rebel 
Angels, follows the Bible History, from the Creation and the Fall 
of Man till it reaches the Offering up of Isaac. It then passes 
suddenly to a full narrative of the Exodus from Eg}'^t, and thence, 
with like abruptness, to the Life of Daniel. At this point we may 
hold the First Part as coming to a close. The Second Part is 
much shorter; and its divisions are so ill-connected that we can 
hardly suppose it to be more than a fragment. It opens with a 
conference of Lucifer and his attendant Sphits, held in their place 
of punishment. Miltonic in more features than one, this very 
animated scene is introduced with a very different purpose, and 
breathes a very different spirit, from the corresponding scene in our 
great Epic. The speakers are full of horror and despau- : their last 
hope has been shattered by the Incarnation : and the passage serves 
merely as a prelude to the next narrative, which represents the 
Saviour's Descent to Hades, an event long holding a prominent place 
in the popular theology of our ancestors. The Deliverer reascends, 
bearing with him redeemed souls from Adam to the time of the Ad- 
vent : and among these, it may be noticed. Eve for a moment lingers 



ANGLO-SAXON PEOSE. 43 

behind to confess her sin ; just as, in Michael Angelo's celebrated 
picture of the Last Day, she hides her face from the Judge. The 
poem next describes briefly the Saviom-'s stay on earth after the 
resurrection : and it closes with the Ascension, and a kind of pro- 
phetic delineation of the Day of Judgment. 

5. Both the Versification of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and its 
Style, are too peculiar to be left altogether unnoticed. 

The melody is regulated, like that of our modern verse, by syl- 
labic emphasis or accent, not by quantity, as in the classical metres. 
The feet oftenest occurring are dactyls and trochees ; a point of dif- 
ference from the modern tongue, whose words fall most readily into 
iambics. Ehyme is used in but few of the surviving pieces. In- 
stead of it, they have what is called alliteration, which consists in 
the introduction, into the same stanza, of several syllables beginning 
with the same letter. It seems to be a universal law of the system, 
that each complete stanza shall be a couplet containing two verses 
or sections, in each of which there must be at least one accented 
syllable beginning with the same letter which begins one of those 
in the other : while more usually the first verse has two of the 
alliterative syllables. The length of the couplets varies much ; but 
most of them have from four to six accents. 

The style is highly elliptical, omitting especially the connecting 
particles. It is fuU of harsh inversions and of obscure metaphors : 
and there occurs, very frequently, an odd kind of repetition, which 
has been shown to depend, m many instances, on a designed paral- 
lelism between the successive members of each sentence. 

None of these features owed its origin to the Anglo-Saxons. Both 
the alliterative metres, and the strained and figurative diction, 
were derived from then- continental ancestors, and are exemplified, 
though less decidedly, in the older poetry of the Northmen. 

ANGLO-SAXON PROSE. 

6. The metrical composition of the '"Anglo-Saxons is not more 
remarkable for its anxious and obscure elaboration, than their prose 
for its straight -forward and perspicuous simplicity. The uses, in- 
deed, to which Prose Writing was put among them, were almost 
always of a practical cast. 

The preference of the Anglo-Saxon tongue over the Latin was 
very marked, especially after the impulse had been given by Alfred; 
to whose time, and those that succeeded, belong almost all our 
extant specimens of prose. Matters of business, which would not 
have been recorded in the language of the time in any other country, 



44 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

then or for centuries afterwards, were almost always so recorded in 
England. This was the case with charters, leases, and the like 
documents : it was the case, also, with ecclesiastical constitutions, 
and with the code of laws which was digested by Alfred, and again 
promulgated with alterations by several of his successors. 

Among prose works claiming a literary character, the original 
compositions are far less numerous than the translations from the 
Latin, in many of which, however, the writers freely insert matter 
of their own. None of these invite our attention so forcibly as 
the versions of parts of the Scriptures. There is still preserved, 
in several manuscripts, a Latin Psalter, with an interlined Anglo- 
Saxon translation, partly metrical ; there are translations and para- 
phrases of the Grospels, with which comments are intermixed ; and 
there are versions of some historical books of the Old Testament. 

Several distmguished men are named as having laboured in this 
sacred task : the Psalms are said to have been translated by Bishop 
Aldhelm ; the Gospel of Saint John by Bede ; and the Psalms or 
other books by Alfred, or rather by the ecclesiastics who were 
about him. But we cannot say positively who were the authors of 
any of the existing versions ; unless it has been rightly inferred that 
•i the Heptateuch, which has been published, was a work of 
' i -^Ifric, who was archbishop of Canterbury in the close of 
tlie tenth century. Tliis, however, we do know ; that, although the 
Moeso-Gothic version of the Gospels was older than any of ours, the 
Anglo-Saxon translations came next in date ; and that they pre- 
ceded, by several generations, all other attempts of the sort made 
in any of the new languages of Europe. 

7. Among the original compositions in prose, is a large stock of 
Homilies or Sermons. Eighty of these were written by the vener- 
able ^Ifric, already named ; and he, in the times of the Protestant 
Reformation, was appealed to as having in some of them combated 
the doctrines of the Church of Eome. He has bequeathed to us also 
more than one theological treatise, a Latin Grammar, a Glossary, 
and probably a curious Manual of Astronomy. He is, however, 
the only man named, as having, after the time of Alfred, been emi- 
nent in the cultivation of the vernacular tongue. A good many 
anonymous works interest us chiefly as illustrative of the state of 
thinking and knowledge. Such are treatises on geography, medi- 
cine, and medical botany ; (in which magical spells play a leading 
part ;) a series of arithmetical problems ; whimsical collections of 
riddles ; and a singular dialogue between Solomon and Saturn, 
seemingly designed for use as a catechism, and extant in more 
shapes than one. 



ANGLO-SAXON PROSE. 45 

Tf the relics now briefly described have then- chief importance, 
merely as showing what our ancestors knew or wished to know, 
there is one monument of their prose literature from which, rude 
and meagre as it is, modern scholars have derived specific and valu- 
able instruction. It is a series of historical records, usually arranged 
together, under the name of The Saxon Chronicle. Eegisters of 
public occurrences were kept in several of the religious houses, much 
in the same way as the Irish Annals ; the practice beginning perhaps 
as early as the time of Alfred, when such a record is said to have 
been carried on under the direction of the primate Plegmund. For 
the earlier periods, the chroniclers appear to have borrowed freely 
from each other, or from common sources ; but in the later times 
each of them set down, from his own knowledge, the great events of 
his own time. Our extant Saxon Chronicle is made up from the 
manuscripts of several such conventual records, all of them in some 
places identical, but each containing much that is not found in the 
rest. They close at different dates, the most recent being brought 
down to the year 1154. 

h. 849, ) ^- Our survey of Anglo-Saxon literature may fitly be 
d. 901. j closed with the illustrious name of Alfred ; 

The pious Alfred, king to Justice dear, 
Lord of the harp and liberating spear ! 

The ninth century in England must be held in abiding rever- 
ence, if it had given birth to no distinguished man but him alone. 
From him went forth, over an ignorant and half-barbarous people, 
a spirit of moral strength, and a thirst for rational enlightenment, 
which worked marvels in the midst of the most formidable difficul- 
ties, and whose effects were checked only by that flood of national 
calamity which, rising ominously during his life, soon swept utterly 
away the ripening harvest of Saxon civilisation. 

His original compositions were very inconsiderable. His favom-- 
ite literary employment was that of rendering, into his native tongue, 
the Latin works from which mainly his own knowledge was derived ; 
works understood by very few among his countrymen, and confess- 
edly understood so imperfectly by himself, that his translations 
are to be regarded as the joint work of himself and his instruc- 
tors. The books selected, as the objects of his chief efibrts, indicate 
strongly his union of practical judgment, of serious and elevated sen- 
timent, and of eager desu-e for the improvement of society. Thus, 
besides the labours on the Scriptures which he performed or en- 
couraged, he translated selections from the Soliloquies of Saint Au- 
gustme of Hippo, the Treatise of Gregory the Great on the Duties 



46 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIMES. 

of tlie Clergy, the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, the Ancient His- 
tory of Orosius, and the work of Boethius on the Consolation of Phil- 
osophy. Often, in dealing with these works, he was not a mere 
translator. If a passage of his author suggested a fact known to 
himself, or an apt train of reflection, the fact or the thought Vas 
added to the original, or substituted for it. Thus he incorporates 
devout reflection and prayer of his ovm with his extracts from Saint 
Austin ; to the geographical portion of Orosius he adds an outline 
of the state of Germany, wonderfully accurate for his opportunities, 
and gives also accounts, taken from the mouths of the adventurers, 
of a voyage to the Baltic, and another towards the North Pole ; 
and the finely thoughtful eloquence of the last of the philosophic 
Eomans prompts to the Teutonic kmg long passages of meditation, 
not unworthy either of the model or of the theme. 

It is probably impossible for us moderns to estimate justly the 
resolute patience of Alfred ; because we can hardly, by any stretch 
of conception, represent to ourselves strongly enough the obstacles 
which, in his time and country, impeded for all men both the acqui- 
sition of knowledge and the communication of it. We find it easier 
to perceive the extraordinary merit of studies pursued, with a suc- 
cess which, though imperfect, was beyond the standard of his age, 
by a man whose frame was racked by almost ceaseless pam ; a man, 
also, whom neither studious industry nor bodily torment disabled 
from toiling with unsurpassed energy as the governor, and legisla- 
tor, and reformer of a nation ; and a man who, while he so worked 
and so suffered, was never allowed to unbuckle the armour which 
he had put on in youth, to defend his father-land against hordes of 
savage enemies. " This," declared he, " is now especially to be 
said ; that I have wished to live worthily while I lived, and after 
my life to leave, to the men that should be after me, nay remem- 
brance in good works." He, too, who thus acknowledged duty as 
the great law of being, had learned hmubly whence it is, that aU 
strength for the performance of duty must be received. He has set 
down the momentous lesson with a labouring quaintness of phrase : 
" When the good things of life are good, then are they good through 
the goodness of the good man that worketh good with them : and 
he is good through God ! " 



THE NORMAN TIMES. 



47 



CHAPTER III, 

THE NOEMAN TIMES. 
A. D. 1066— A. D. 1307, 



William L, 1066-1087. 

William IL, 1087-1100. 

Henry I.,. 1100-1135. 

Stephen, 1135-1154. 

Plenryll., 1154-1189. 



Richard L, 1189-1199. 

John,.... 1199-1216. 

Henry III., 1216-1272. 

Edward L, 1272-1307. 



SECTION FIRST : LITERATURE IN THE LATIN TONGUE. 

Introduction to the Period. 1. Distribution of Eaces and Kingdoms. — 

2. Literary Character of the Times. — The Eegular Latin Literature. 

3. Learning in the Eleventh Century — Lanfranc — iinselm. — 4. Philo- 
sophy and Physical Science in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries — 
Hales and Duns Scotus — Eoger Bacon. — 5. Historians — William of 
Malmesbury — Geoffrey of Monmouth — Glirald du Barri — Matthew Paris. 
— 6. Success in Poetry — Joseph of Exeter — Geoffrey de Vinsauf — Nigel 
Wircker's Ass. — The Irregular Latin Literature. 7. Latin Pasquin- 
ades — The Priest Golias — Walter Mapes. — 8. Collections of Tales in Latin 
— Gervase of Tilbury — The Seven Sages — The Gesta Eomanorum — 
Nature of the Stories. — 9. Uses of the Collections of Tales — Eeading in 
Monasteries — Manuals for Preachers — Morals annexed in the Gesta — 
Specimens. — 10. Use of the Latin Stories by the Poets — Chivalrous 
Eomances taken from them — Chaucer and Gower — Shakspeare and Sir 
Walter Scott — Miscellaneous Instances. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD. 

1. At this point we have to take account, for the last time, of 
events that affected the distribution of the nations inhabiting our 
country, and the languages spoken in the several regions. 

The Norman Conquest introduced into England a foreign race of 
nobles and landholders, dispossessing certainly a large majority, and 
probably almost the whole body, of those who had been the ruling 
class in the preceding times. But the only new settlers were the 
kings, the barons with their military vassals, and the many church- 
men who followed the Conqueror and his successors. The mass of the 
people continued to be Teutonic ; and the mixture of the Saxons 



48 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

with the Britons was now completed in all those provinces that were 
subject to the Norman kings. The Anglo-Saxon tongue, in the state 
of transition which it was undergoing throughout the period now 
in question, spread itself everywhere over those territories in the 
course of two or three centuries, Cornwall being perhaps the only 
exception. The Cymric tongue continued to be spoken in Wales, 
not only while the Welsh princes maintained their independence, 
but after they were subdued by Edward the First. 

The boundaries of the kingdom of Scotland were now stretched 
southward, to the line which has marked them ever since. In the 
western district of the border, the two petty British states had 
aheady become dependent on their more powerful neighbours. For 
Cumbria had been incorporated into Anglo-Saxon England, and had 
passed under the sceptre of the Normans ; while the kings of Scot- 
land had acquired, on the south of the Clyde, territories which may 
be supposed to have mainly constituted the ancient princedom of 
Strathclyde. On the eastern border, again, a long series of wars 
took place between England and Scotland ; but, in the end, Ber- 
wickshire and the Lothians were, for a time at least, held by the 
Scottish kings as fiefs under the English crown. Gradually an 
Anglo-Saxon dialect became universal throughout the Scottish 
Lowlands ; the Highlands retaining their Celtic inhabitants and 
Gaelic speech. 

For Ireland, invaded by the English in the year 1170, there op- 
ened a series of ages, in which the misery and disorganization of 
native feuds were succeeded by the evils of foreign oppression, evils 
yet more irritating, and more thorouglily preventive both of social and 
of intellectual advancement. ' The literary history of that beautiful 
and unfortunate country must be for us a dead blank, till, in mo- 
dern times, we gladly discover many Irishmen among the most va- 
luable citizens in the republic of letters. 

2. In England, during this long period, literature flowed onward 
in its course, with a ceaseless, though somewhat eddying tide. 

The generation which succeeded the Conquest gave birth, as we 
might have expected, to little that was very remarkable. The 
twelfth century, beginning with the reign of the accomplished 
Henry Beauclerc, and closing with that of the chivalrous Coeur-de- 
Lion, was distinguished, beyond aU parts of our mediaeval history, 
for the prosperity of classical scholarship ; and the Norman-French 
poetry, stu(hed with ardour, began to find Enghsh imitators. 

The thirteenth century was a decisive epoch, not more for the 
constitutional history of England, than for its intellectual progress. 
The Great Charter was extorted from King John ; the commercial 



KEGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 49 

activity of the towns, and the representative functions of all the 
commons, were thoroughly grounded in the reign of his successor ; 
and the ambition of Edward Longshanks, successful in crushing 
the independence of Wales, was equally so in Scotland, till the 
single-handed heroism of Wallace gave warning of the spirit which 
was to achieve deliverance on the field of Bannockburn. During 
this momentous array of public events, the English universities 
were founded or regularly organized ; the stream of learning which 
had descended from preceding generations was turned into a new 
channel, giving birth to some of the greatest philosophers and scien- 
tific men of the Middle Ages ; the romantic poetry of Northern 
France continued to flourish, and nowl)egan to be transfused into 
a language intelligible throughout England ; and, above all, the 
Anglo-Saxon tongue passed, in the com-se of this century, through 
the last of those phases which transformed it into English. 

This was also a time when religious sentiment was very keen. 
Three of the crusades had previously taken place ; and the other 
four fell within the thirteenth century. They not only diffused 
knowledge, but kindled a flame of zeal : and the foundation and 
prosperity of the rival monastic orders of Dominicans and Fran- 
ciscans, (the Black and Grey Friars of our history,) showed alike 
the devotion of the age, the growing suspicion that the church 
needed reform, and the dexterity of the Papal See in using zealots 
and malcontents for her own ends. 

The Literature of those two centuries and a half will now 
engage our attention, that which was couched in Latin being first 
examined. 

THE REGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 

S. In a generation or two after the Conquest, Classical and Theo- 
logical learning, if profoundly acquired by few, was pursued by very 
many. There was no inconsiderable activity in the monasteries, as 
well as among the secular clergy ; and, however apocryphal may be 
the alleged foundation of the older of the two English universities 
by Alfred, it is certain that, both at Oxford and Cambridge, by the 
beginning of the twelfth century, schools had been established, 
which were thenceforth permanent, and rapidly attained an aca- 
demic organization. The continental universities, and the other 
ecclesiastical seminaries, both in France and elsewhere, were con- 
tinually exchanging with England both pupils and teachers. 

But the movement was, as yet, almost wholly among the Normans 
and their dependents : and the only great names which adorned 
the annals of erudition in England, in the latter half of the eleventh 

c 



50 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

century, were those of two Lombard priests, Lanfranc and Anselm. 
Both of them were brought by Duke William from his famous abbey 
of Bee ; and, being raised in succession to the primacy, they not only 
prepared the means for diffusmg among the ecclesiastics a respectable 
amount of classical learning, but themselves acquired and have retained 
high celebrity as theological Avriters. Lanfranc was chiefly famous for 
the dialectic dexterity with which he defended the Romish doctrine 
of the eucharist. Anselm, a singularly original and subtle thinker, 
is held by many to have been the true founder of the scholastic 
philosophy ; and he is especially remarkable as having been the first 
to attempt moulding, into a scientific shape, that which has been 
called the argument a 'priori for the existence of the Supreme Being. 
It is hardly necessary to remark, that these speculations, and all 
other ecclesiastical and theological writmgs for several ages after- 
wards, were composed in Latin. The excuse of ignorance among 
the clergy, so artlessly assigned in the Anglo-Saxon times as a rea- 
son for writing in the living tongue, was no longer to be listened 
to : and the practice of freely pubhshing such knowledge to the laity 
was heretical in the eyes of those ecclesiastical chiefs, who now 
sat in the chairs of Aldhelm and ^Ifric. 

4. The abstract speculations of Lanfranc and Anselm were but 
slowly appreciated or emulated in England. Their effects, however, 
may be traced, to some extent, in the theological and other writings of 
the two most learned men whom the country possessed during the 
next century. John of Salisbury, befriended by Thomas a Becket, 
did himself honour by the fidehty which he maintained towards his 
patron ; and he may be reckoned an opponent, not very formidable, 
of the scholastic philosophy. Peter of Blois, brought from France, 
became the king's secretary and an active statesman. 

In the thirteenth century, when the teaching of Roscellinus and 
Abelard had made philosophy the favourite pursuit of all the most 
active-minded scholars throughout Europe, England possessed names 
which in this field stood higher than any others. Alexander de 
Hales, called " The Irrefragable Doctor," was a native of Glou- 
cestershire ; but he was educated and lived abroad. " The Subtle 
h ab. 1265 > Doctor," Joannes Duns Scotus, was born either in 
d. 1308. J Northumberland or Berwickshire, received his education 
from the Franciscan friars at Oxford, taught and wrote with extra- 
ordinary reputation both there and at Paris and Cologne, and died 
in the prime of life. He was one of the most acute of thinkers, 
and founded a characteristic system of philosophical doctrine. 
. In the same age, while Scotland sent Michael Scot into Germany 
to prosecute physical science with a success which earned for him 



REGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 51 

the fame of a sorcerer, a similar course was followed at Oxford and 
Paris, and a similar character acquired through labours still more 
b. ab. 1214, I valuable, by Eoger Bacon, a Franciscan friar. This 
d. 1292. I great man's life of scientific experiment and abstruse 
reflection was embittered, not only by the fears and suspicions of 
the vulgar, but by the persecutions of his ecclesiastical superiors. 
His writings abound with curious conjectures, asserting the possi- 
bility of discoveries which have actually been made in modern times. 
In his supposed invention of gunpowder, we may perceive the foun- 
dation of the story which was told, how the fiend, to whom the 
heretical wizard had sold himself, carried away his victim in a whirl- 
wind of fire. 

5. The unsettled state of the languages spoken in England co- 
operated with the clerical tendencies, in causing the Latin to become 
the vehicle of almost all Historical writing. 

Very few works of this class possessed, till much later, any 
literary merit : but very many of them, still extant, are valuable or 
curious as records of facts. A considerable number of Chronicles 
were kept in the monasteries, furnishing, from one quarter or an- 
other, a series which extends through the greater part of the Middle 
Ages. The individual Historians, aU of them ecclesiastics, were 
very numerous. Among those who have claims to notice for skill 
in writing, William of Malmesbury, one of the earliest, (but virtually 
belonging to the twelfth century,) deserves honour as an industrious 
and candid investigator of early traditions. The history of Geoffrey 
of Monmouth is notorious for its unsifted mass of legendary fiction ; 
but the poetical student cannot well be ungrateful to the preserver of 
the fable of Arthur, and of the stories, hardly better vouched, of 
Lear and Cymbeline. The vain and versatile Girald de Barri, best 
known by the name of Giraldus Cambrensis, has left elaborate his- 
torical and topographical works, notable for their national partiali- 
ties, especially in Irish affairs, but very lively both in narrative and 
description. The principal work of Matthew Paris, a Benedictine 
monk of Saint Albans, shows close acquaintance with the events of his 
times, and is written with very great spirit. Its freedom of dealing 
with church questions made it a favourite authority with the early 
Reformers. 

Of the many other historians and chroniclers, it may be enough 
to name, as perhaps possessing greater importance than the rest, 
Henry of Huntingdon, Gervase of Tilbury, Eoger de Iloveden, and 
the recently discovered Jocelin de Brakelonde. 

6. The classical knowledge of the times was tested more severely 
by composition in Latin Verse, which was practised actively by 



52 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

some of those historical writers, as well as by many others : and the 
success is allowed to have been surprisingly great. Besides innu- 
merable smaU pieces, there were several very ambitious attempts, the 
d. aft. \ best of which were the two epics of Josephus Iscanus, that is, 
1200. j" Joseph of Exeter. His " Antiocheis," celebrating the third 
crusade, is almost entirely lost: his poem " On the Trojan War" 
has so much of classical purity, that, after the general revival of 
learning, it was several times printed as a work of Cornelius Nepos. 
Geoffi'ey de Vinsauf's didactic poem '' On the New Poetry," is a 
treatise on composition, whose showy affectations, obtaining a pop- 
ularity refused to his more correct contemporaries, have been 
blamed for some part of the false taste that soon prevailed. But 
the most amusing of all our early classical poems is a satire called 
" The Mirror of Fools," wi-itten by Nigel Whcker, a monk of Can- 
terbury. The hero, Brunellus, is literally an ass, who, ambitious of 
distinction, studies in the university of Paris, and enters successively 
all the monastic orders. Dissatisfied both with the learned men 
and the monks, he sets about forming a new sect of his own : but, 
caught by his old master, he is compelled to resume his natural 
station, and close his life in carrying panniers. 

In the thirteenth century the studies of phUologers were extended 
to Greek and Hebrew, chiefly after the example had been set by 
Robert Grossetete or Grosthead, the universally accomplished 
Bishop of Lincoln. 

THE IRREGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 

7. Before the time when Bacon and Michael Scot were said to 
have dealt with supernatural beings, the people of England had 
really begun to be possessed by a spirit which was destined soon 
to exert tremendous power, the spirit of resistance to tyranny and 
abuse, both ecclesiastical and secular. The Latin tongue became, 
somewhat oddly, one of the spells used for the evocation. 

There had arisen, in the lowest times of classical taste, a fashion 
of ending Latin verses with rhymes. When the versification of 
some of the modern tongues had been partly formed, Latinists 
imitated it, not only rhyming their lines, but constructing them by 
accent, with a convenient disregard of quantity. Much devotional 
poetry was written after this model, and not a little of it in our own 
country. But the most curious specimens are a huge number 
of pieces, still preserved, in which verses so framed are made the 
medium of personal and public satire. 

Such attacks on the clergy and the church began about the 
middle of the twelfth century, and can be traced far onward in the 



IRREGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 53 

next. The boldness of invective would be incredible, especially 
since churchmen were almost always the writers ; were we not to 
remember the peculiar position of the church in England, and also 
several special circumstances in the history of the time. The most 
lively and biting of our satires of this class are connected by a 
whimsical thread. The hero is an imaginary priest called Golias, 
who is at once a personification of the worthless ecclesiastics, and 
the mouthpiece of the body in their remonstrances to theii* rulers ; 
whUe he is occasionally made a bishop, when his elevation helps to 
give point to a sarcasm directed against the dignified clergy. From 
the humorously and coarsely candid " Confession of Golias" are 
extracted the verses which have so often been quoted as a drinking- 
d. aft.) song, and attributed to Walter Map or Mapes.* For this 
1196. J and other reasons, it is believed that the character of the hero 
may have been invented, and that in all likelihood many of the poems 
were written, by Mapes ; a man of knowledge as well as wit and 
fancy, who might have been named as the author of a curious mis- 
cellany in Latin prose, and will come in our way immediately as a 
writer in another field. He was a favourite of Henry the Second, 
and promoted by him to the archdeaconry of Oxford, and to other 
benefices. 

With the reign of John begins a new series of Latin pasquinades, 
levelled at the political questions of the day, and all embracing the 
popular side. The king and his successor are lashed unsparingly : 
the persons praised are De Montfort, and the other barons who 
opposed the crown. The Latin, however, although the appropriate 
organ of circulation among the clergy, was not so for any other 
audience. It continued to be used, but less and less : the Norman- 
French became more frequent, a fact which seemmgly indicates a 
design of the writers to obtain a hearing among the nobles and 
their retainers; and, towards the end of our period, the English 
dialect of the day was almost the only medium of this satirical 
minstrelsy. About the close of the century, the ballad-makers 
employed themselves in fanning that patriotic hatred of French- 
men, which the wars of Edward the First made it desirable for the 
descendants of the Normans to foster ; and the Scots, for similar 
reasons, were libelled with equal good-will. One piece, a bitter 
complaint of oppression of the poor by the nobles and higher church- 
men, purports to have been written by an outlaw in the greenwood, 
and thrown on the highway to be picked up by passengers. 

8. The dignity of the Koman tongue was hardly infringed fur- 

* Meum est propositum in taberna mori. 



54 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

ther by the jests of Golias and his confederates, than it was by 
another use to which it was frequently put in the times under 
review, and by which the later poetry of Europe profited 
largely. 

It became the means of preserving and transmitting an immense 
stock of Tales, which otherwise would inevitably have been lost, 
and which, from those days down to our own, have been the 
germs of the finest poetical inventions. Such stories found, on 
various pleas, ready admission into works of a very serious kind : 
and, in particular, the want of critical judgment with which his- 
tory was written, gave room for the grave relation of many legends 
of the wildest character. One of our countrymen, already named, 
Gervase of Tilbury, in an historical work presented to his patron 
the Emperor of Germany about the beginning of the thirteenth 
century, inserted a special section " On the Marvels of the World." 
It abounds with the strangest fictions, which reappeared again and 
again for centuries : and one of its superstitious legends suggested 
to Sir Walter Scott the combat of Marmion with the spectre- 
knight. Other churchmen employed their leisure in collecting 
stories avowedly fictitious : and among these was an English 
Cistertian monk, Odo de Cerinton, who, a little earlier than 
Gervase, compiled a very curious mass of moral fables and other 
short narratives. 

Many scattered inventions of the sort travelled from the East, 
in the course of that constant communication with Asia which 
was maintained in the age of the Crusades : and from that 
quarter came the earliest of those collections, in which the separate 
tales were linked together by one consecutive story. This was 
the Indian romance of Sindabad ; which, through the Hebrew and 
Greek, passed into the Latin, and thence into every living tongue 
of Europe, appearing both in prose and verse, and being made to 
assume new names and manners in each of its new shapes. It is 
commonly known as " The Seven Sages," and underwent its last 
stage of decay in becoming one of our own common chap-books. 
In its most usual form, the outline which connects the parts to- 
gether is this. The son of a Koman emperor is condemned to 
death by his father, on the instigation of an evil-minded step- 
mother : and, warned by a magician, he remains obstinately silent, 
though he had it in his power to exculpate himself completely- 
The seven wise men who were the imperial counsellors endeavour 
to move their lord to mercy, by telling him tale after tale to prove 
the danger of rash judgments : the empress strives to destroy the 
efiect of each lesson, by a tale inculcating justice or promptitude : 



IRREGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 55 

and the prince's life is thus preserved, till, the appointed days of 
silence having elapsed, he makes his defence and exposes the 
calumny of his accuser. Several of the stories told are repeated 
in other collections of the sort, as well as in the later poetry of 
England and the continent. 

A celebrity yet greater was attained, and a wider influence 
exerted on literature, by another series of fictions, not united by 
any one story, and known by a title for which, various as its matter 
is, hardly any part of it furnishes a reason. It is called the " Gesta 
Romanorum," or "Deeds of the Romans." Manufactured into 
different shapes in different countries, and not having the same 
contents in any two of them, it is everywhere a medley of the 
most dissimilar elements. There are fables in the manner of 
JEsop, and distorted fragments of Grecian learning, from Argus 
and Mercury to Alexander of Macedon and his tutor Aristotle. 
In the Roman history we begin with memorials of the ^neid, 
being told how Pallas the son of Evander was a giant, his skeleton, 
when disinterred, exceeding in length the height of the walls of Rome ; 
the leap of Curtius mto the gulf which yawned in the forum is said 
to have been performed by Marcus Aurelius ; and the poet Virgil as- 
sumes the character, which he still retains by tradition in Italy, of a 
mighty but benevolent enchanter. The outlines of some thrilling 
tales of terror are furnished by the record of local superstitions, 
celebrattag visitations of supernatural beings and the adventures 
of treasure-seekers who descend into caverns magically protected. 
And it is worth while to note that, in one of the most elaborate of 
these fictions, the original hero was the learned Gerbert, believed 
to have introduced algebra into Christendom ; who, although ho 
became the last pope of the tenth century, paid the old penalty of 
emment knowledge by being regarded as a magician. One or two 
of the tales are monkish legends : some are short chivalrous ro- 
mances : some are moral and religious apologues or parables. 
Others, pretty numerous, are familiar pictures of society, ahnost 
always satirical in cast, and levelling their wit most frequently at 
the female sex. In pieces of this last kind, the " Gesta" very often 
have a close resemblance, in character as well as incident, to those 
French poems which we shall immediately know by the name of 
Fabliaux. 

It is alike uncertain when, where, and by whom the " Gesta" were 
first compiled. Probably they arose in Germany : but so many of 
the stories are taken from older sources, that, even if the collection 
did not find its way to England till the fourteenth century, there 
can have been few of them that were not already known. 



5Q THE NORMAN TIMES. 

9. The uses to which those Latm tales were applied in the 
middle ages were very various, and several of them not a little 
amusing. Some of the collectors may have had no further aim, 
than that of relieving the weariness of a monk's inactive life ; and 
copies were multiplied in the convents, for the benefit of those 
brothers who were disinclined to weightier studies. It has been 
believed, also, that, in those readings aloud during meals, which 
were practised in most of the monastic communities, the light 
stories often took their turn -with books of a more solid kind. 

But the collections of fiction were used yet more publicly. They 
became the manuals of preachers, who had recourse to them for 
examples and illustrations suitable to the taste of rude and ignorant 
hearers. Several books of the sort were avowedly designed for 
being useful in this way : and one of these at least was written in 
England, bearing a title which may be translated, "The Text-book of 
Preachers." It was compiled in the latter part of the fourteenth 
century, by John Bromyard, a Dominican friar, himself noted as a 
pulpit orator, and as a strenuous opponent of Wycliffe. 

The " Gesta" themselves, in all their shapes, are carefully adapted 
for this and other didactic purposes. For there is annexed to every 
tale a religious application or moral. These practical inferences 
are often absurdly inapplicable to the narrative, and could not well 
have been otherwise : often, also, they are dexterously devised for 
recommending superstitious practices or erroneous doctrines : and 
the freedom of dealing with sacred things and names makes many 
of them unfit to be recorded. An idea of the turn they usually 
take may be gathered from one little narrative, which probably was 
invented for the sake of the moral. A dying emperor puts into 
the hands of his son a golden apple, which, travelling through dis- 
tant lands, he is to present to the greatest fool he can find. After 
many wanderings, the prince reaches a country whose government 
is regulated by a strange lav/ : the king is appointed for one year 
only, at the end of which he is banished, and must die poor and 
miserable. The traveller asks whether any one has been found to 
fill the last vacancy : and, learning that the throne is occupied, he 
offers his apple to the king, as the most foolish man he has ever 
encountered. The leading doctrine to be inferred is very obvious. 
The unwise king is the sinful man, who lives for the fleeting enjoy- 
ments of this world, content to purchase them by lasting misery 
in the next. Laymen sometimes outdid the clergy themselves, in 
the ingenuity with which they moralised the favourite inventions. 
There is a picturesque story of a nobleman, who, falling into a deep 
pit, in which are a lion an ape and a serpent, is rescued by a wood- 



IRREGULAR LATIN LITERATURE. 57 

cutter. Instead of rewarding his benefactor, he causes him to be 
cruelly beaten. The historian Matthew of Paris tells us, that this 
fable was frequently in the mouth of Richard Coeui'-de-Lion ; and 
that he applied it as representing the ingratitude to heaven shown 
by those princes of Christendom, who refused to assist in wresting 
the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels. 

10. The re-appearances of those monastic fantasies in English 
poetry have been so frequent and so interesting, that we are 
tempted to anticipate a little for the purpose of making ourselves 
acquainted with some of them. 

Both in the Latin, and in French translations, they became 
current in England, as elsewhere, before the close of the thirteenth 
century. Stories either identical with some of them, or very lilce, 
appear early among the Chivalrous Romances ; a class of works 
whose history, both in their origina,l French, and in the English 
translations and imitations, we shall immediately begin to study. 
Indeed it is not always certain whether the minstrels have bor- 
rowed from the monks, or the monks from the minstrels. Two of 
the most famous of the romances which still survive in our own 
language, are in substance the same with stories of the " G-esta. " 
The one is " Guy of Warwick," which, in its shnplest shape, is 
truly a devout legend, breathing a darkly ascetic sphit. The hero 
deserts his wife and child to do battle in the Holy Land : returning 
home, he thmks proper, instead of rejoining his family, to liide him- 
self in a hermitage near his castle : and only on his deathbed does 
he allow himself to be recognised. The other romance is Robert 
of Sicily, which shrouds a fime moral under a fantastic disguise. 
The prince being puffed up with pride, an angel is sent to assume 
his figure and take liis place ; while he, changed so as not to be 
known, is insulted and neglected, and becomes thankful to be 
received as the jester of the court. After long penance has taught 
liim humility, he is restored to dignity and happiness. 

When we reach the poetry which adorned England in the latter 
half of the fourteenth century, we shall have to examine the works 
of its two chief masters so closely, that their obhgations to the 
Latin books of amusement could not at present be specified without 
causing a risk of repetition. But we ought here to learn that 
Chaucer, the gi-eatest of our old poets, owes to the "Gesta" two 
at least, if not more, of his tales ; and tliat Gower, a man of much 
weaker invention, borrows from them with yet greater freedom. 

The latter of these names, however, introduces us, with seeming 
abruptness, to the most celebrated name in our literature. The 
longest piece in the " Gesta" is the romance of " Apollonius," a 

c2 



58 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

very popular fiction throughout the middle ages, and preserved 
even in an Anglo-Saxon version. It was the foundation of Gower's 
most elaborate poem : and this again furnished the plot of " Pericles, 
Prince of Tyre." The drama so called is usually printed among 
the works of Shakspeare, and not without good reason ; since it is, 
in all likelihood, either wholly a production of his early manhood, 
or one of those plays which, in that stage of his life, he concocted 
by altering and augmenting older dramas. Further, our immortal 
poet's "Merchant of Venice" is doubly indebted, if not to the 
Latin " Gesta," yet certainly to the English translation, or to 
some of the compilations which borrowed from its stores. For in 
it appeared, perhaps for the first time, the story which was the 
origmal of the caskets exhibited for choice by Portia to her lovers; 
and there we find, also, the incident of the bond in which the for- 
feit was a pound of flesh, and the device by which the penalty was 
evaded. 

The spectre-legend, too, which has been noticed as re-modelled 
in Marmion, is in the " Gesta ;" though it was taken from the 
older source by the Scottish poet. Not a few jests, likewise, which 
in their modern shape have received the credit of being new, reaUy 
flow from this venerable source. It is enough to cite, as an instance, 
a story occurring in some of our school-books, that of " The Three 
Black Crows." Parnell's pleasing poem " The Plermit" has the 
same origin. Nor is it unworthy of remembrance, that one of the 
^sop-fables of the old books suggested, directly or indirectly, the 
phrase of " Bellmg the Cat," used by the Earl of Angus in the 
rebellion against James the Third of Scotland. The mice hold a 
council, to deliberate how they may protect themselves from the 
cunning of the cat. They adopt unanimously a resolution proposed 
by one of the sages of the race ; that a bell shall be hung round 
the neck of their enemy, to warn them of his approach by its ring- 
ing. The scheme proves useless by reason of one trifling difficulty : 
no mouse is brave enough to undertake putting it in execution. 



THE NORMAN TIMES, 59 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE NOEMAN TIMES. 
A. D. 1066— A. D. 1307. 

SECTION SECOND : LITERATURE IN THE NORMAN - FRENCH AND 
SAXON-ENGLISH TONGUES. 

Noeman-Feench, 1. The Two Languages of France — Poetry of the Nor- 
mans — The Fabliaux and Chivalrous Eomances. — 2. Anglo-Norman 
Eomances from English History — The Legend of Havelok — Gro^vi^th of 
Fictitious Embellishments — Translations into English. — 3. Ang)l)-Nor- 
man Eomances of the Eound Table — Outline of their Story. — 4. J^uthors 
and Translators of Anglo-Norman Eomances — Chiefly Englishmen — 
Borron — Cast — Mapes. — Saxon-English. 5. Decay of the Anglo-Saxon 
Tongue — The Saxon Chronicle. — 6. Extant Eelics of Semi-Saxon English 
Verse — Historical Works partly from the French — Approach to the Eng- 
lish Tongue — The Brut of Layamon — Eobert of Gloucester — Eobert Man- 
nyng. — 7. Other Metrical Eelics of Semi-Saxon and Early English Verse 
— The Ormulum — The Owl and the Nightingale — Michael of Kildare — 
The Ancient English Drama. 

NORMAN-FRENCH LITERATURE. 

1. We must now learn something as to that vigorous and imagina- 
tive school of Poetry, which arose in the Norman-French tongue, 
and was the model of all the earliest poetical efforts in our own. 

Before the close of the Dark Ages, there were formed in France, 
out of the decayed Latin, with some Teutonic additions from the 
Franks, two leading dialects. They were spoken in different 
quarters ; and each of them became, early in the Middle Ages, the 
vehicle of a characteristic literature. 

In Southern France was used the Proven9al, or tongue of Pro- 
vence, named also the Langue d'Oc, or tongue of Oc, from the word 
in it corresponding to our " yes." It was liker to the Italian and 
Spanish than to the modern French. Its poets called themselves 
Troubadours, that is, Inventors ; just as our old English and Scot- 
tish poets were named Makers. Its poetry was chiefly lyrical, and 
became the favourite model of the early poets of Italy, affecting our 
own literature to some extent, but not very early or very materially. 

The dialect of Northern France was known as the Langue d'Oil 



60 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

or d'Oui. But we speak of it oftenest as Noraaan-French ; because 
it was in Normandy that its cultivation was completed, and there also 
that important literary works were first composed in it. It became 
the standard tongue of France, and has continued to be so. Its poets 
had the name of Trouveres or Trouveurs. The greater part of its 
poetry was narrative ; and most of the tales may be referred to the 
one or the other of two classes. There were the poems called Fab- 
liaux, usually short stories, which had a familiar and comic tone, 
even when they dealt with the same kind of incidents as poems of 
the other class. There were, again, the Chivalrous Eomances, com- 
positions more bulky, and almost always more serious in temper 
as well as more ambitious in design. 

The Fabliaux affected our literature little till the time of Chaucer. 
In regard to their character, we hardly require to know more than 
that which we may gather from remembering the likeness which, as 
we have learned, subsisted between them and the lighter stories in 
the monastic collections of Latin fiction. It should also be ob- 
served, however, that many poems, usually described as Fabliaux, 
rise decidedly into the serious and imaginative tone of the romances ; 
and that some collections of narratives, in Norman-French verse, 
exhibit the same author as attempting both kinds of composition. 
Of this mixed kind are the works of a poetess, usually known as 
Marie of France, who probably wrote in Brittany, but made copious 
use of British materials, and addresses herself to a king, supposed 
to have been our Henry the Third. Her twelve "Lays," some of 
which have their scene laid in England, and celebrate the marvels 
of the Round Table, are among the most beautiful relics which the 
middle ages have left us. • They were well known, and freely used, 
by Chaucer and others of our poets. Her " Fables" are mteresting 
in another way. She acknowledges having translated them from 
the English tongue ; and one of the manuscripts makes her assign 
the authorship of her originals to king Alfred. 

The Romances of Chivalry we must learn to understand more 
exactly than the Fabliaux. They are the effusions of a rude min- 
strelsy, using an imperfect language, and guided by irregular im- 
pulse, not by laws of art ; but many of them are, in parts at least, 
delightfully imaginative, spirited, or pathetic. The history of the 
whole class is important, not only for their value as illustrations of 
mediaeval manners and customs, but also for their intimate connexion 
with our early literature ; 

Where, in the chronicle of wasted time, 

We see descriptions of the fairest wights, 
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, 

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights. 



ANGLO-NORMAN ROMANCES. 61 

Tlie earliest of them, except such as were really nothing more 
than devout legends, were founded on historical traditions of Eng- 
land ; and tales engrafted on these were the best and most popular 
of the series. Native Englishmen, also, wi-itmg in French, were among 
the most active of those who worked up om- national stories into 
the romantic shape ; aU the French works were composed for our 
English court and nobles ; and translation of them was the most fre- 
quent use to which our mfant-language was applied. Above all, 
they imprinted on our poetry, in its oldest stages, characteristics 
which it did not lose for centuries, if indeed it can be said to have 
lost them at all. 

2. The oldest among them, like other early pieces of narrative 
poetry, are based on national events, and are not distinguishable, by 
any well-drawn line, from popular and legendary histories. Such is 
the character of an ancient French romance, which is particularly 
mteresting to xis, both on account of its story, and because it exists 
also in a very ancient English dress. It relates one of those tradi- 
tions of the east of England, by which the Norse settlers strove 
to give dignity to theu* arrival in the island. This romance of 
" Havelok " was written, in French, early in the twelfth century. 
The poem is almost free from the anachronisms of manners and sen- 
timent which soon became universal ; and the cast of the story is 
simple and antique. Its hero, the orphan child of a Danish king, 
exposed at sea by the treachery of his guardian, is drifted on the 
coast of Lincolnshu'e, and fostered by the fisherman Grim, who after- 
wards gives his name to an English town. A princess of England, 
imprisoned by guardians as false as Havelok's, is forced by them to 
marry him, that she may thus be irretrievably degraded : he reveals 
his royal descent, already marked by a flame playing round his head ; 
and, in fierce battles, he reconquers his wife's inheritance and his own. 

The writers of the romances gradually departed, more and more, 
from the facts given to them by the chronicles and popular tradi- 
tions. They substituted private exploits and perils for national 
events, with increasing frequency, till then* incidents and their per- 
sonages were equally the offspring of pm-e invention : they ceased 
to aim at true representation of the manners and institutions of anti- 
quity, and minutely described the past from their observation of the 
present. Seizing on the most poetical features of society, as it ap- 
peared among the nobles in whose haUs then* songs were to be chanted, 
they wove out of these the gorgeously coloured web of chivalry, 
with its pictures of life eccentrically yet attractively unreal, and its 
anomalous code of morals, alternately severe and loose, generous 
and savage. They combined, into startling contrasts, both in the 



62 THE NORMAN TIMES. 

scenery and in the adventures, the wild rudeness of ancient bar- 
barism with the ambitious pomp of castles and palaces. They 
conjured up, around their knights and ladies, a shadowy world of 
monsters and marvels, to which the icy north contributed its dwarfs 
and giants, its earthdrakes and its talismanic weapons; while a 
vast array of fairies and magicians, of spells and prophecies, was 
gathered from superstitions floating about among the people, which 
were partly remembrances of heathenism altered by distance, partly 
corruptions of Christian belief natural to times of general ignorance, 
and partly oriental fables that had travelled from Spain and the 
Holy Land. 

We have noticed the only extant romance, founded on English 
history, in which these transformations are not strikingly shown. 
The least extravagant peculiarities of chivalry are introduced freely 
in the " Gest of King Horn ;" which relates a story very like in 
outline to that of Havelok, and is believed, by our best critics, to 
have had its origin in some genuine Saxon tradition. In " Bevis of 
Hamptoun," and " Guy of Warwick," the historical character is 
utterly lost ; and the heroes and their adventures are specimens of 
the most fantastic knight-errantry. In no instance were liberties 
taken so boldly with matters of fact, as in the romance of ". Richard 
Cceur de Lion," composed in French not many years after its hero's 
death. It gives him a fiend for his mother, distorts his war m Pales- 
tine and his captivity into the wildest farrago of impossible exploits 
and dangers, and exaggerates his fanciful and choleric disposition 
into the perfection of chivalrous Quixotism and martial ferocity. 

3. Of all the French romances, incomparably the most interest- 
ing are those that celebrate the glory and the fall of King Arthur 
and his Knights of the Round Table. No poems of the class deviate 
so widely from the track of the old legends : none prove so forcibly 
to the discriminating reader the hoUowness of the chivalrous mo- 
rality ; and none display, so brilliantly or so often, pictures roman- 
tically beautiful and scenes of tragic pathos. 

The series, when completed, embraced the history of several 
generations. Before it had reached this point, the heroes had be- 
come so numerous, and the adventures so complicated, that a mere 
abstract would fill many pages. The supernatural machinery, in- 
troduced more profusely than in any other of the tales, and breath- 
ing a singular tone of mystic awfulness, touched at many points 
ground too sacred to be trodden carelessly. Although, likewise, 
the leading outline of the story implies strikingly a recognition of 
moral responsibility and retribution, the terrible lesson of the 
catastrophe is often forgotten in the details ; and revolting incidents. 



ANGLO-NORMAN ROMANCES. 63 

interwoven inextricably into the tissue of the narrative, pollute all 
the principal pieces of the group. Minute description, therefore, of 
those singular monuments, is here impossible. But a little acquaint- 
ance with them is needed, for a just comprehension of many things 
in our early poetry ; and, although the pieces in their earliest forms 
are difficult of access, the research of an eminent scholar has made 
it easy to know something in regard to them. 

The order in which the principal parts of the series were com- 
posed, appears to have been the same with that of the events 
narrated. 

First comes the Eomance of " The Saint Graal, " (the holy vessel 
or cup,) which is in truth a saintly legend rather than a chivalrouvS 
tale. It is chiefly occupied in relating the history of the most revered 
of all religious relics, which not only proved and typified the mystery 
of the mass, but worked by its mere presence the most striking 
miracles. Treasured up by Joseph of Arimathea, it was by him or 
his descendants carried into Britain ; but, too sacred to be looked on 
by a sinful people, it vanishedfor ages from the eyes of men. Secondly, 
the " Merlin," deriving its name from the fiend-born prophet and 
magician, celebrates the birth and exploits of Arthur, and the 
gathering round him of the peerless Knights of the Eound Table. 
The story is founded on Geofirey of Monmouth, or his Welsh and 
Armorican authorities ; but the chivalrous and supernatural features 
disguise almost completely the historic origin. Thirdly, in the "Lance- 
lot," the national character of the incidents disappears, anew set of 
personages emerge, and the marvellous adornments are of a more 
modern cast. The hero, nurtured from childhood by the Lady of 
the Lake in her fairy-realm beneath the waters, grows up to be, not 
only the bravest champion of the Eound Table, but the most ad- 
mired for all the virtues of knighthood ; and this, too, while he lives 
in foul and deadly sin, and wrongs with secret treachery Arthur, his 
lord and benefactor. From his guilt, imitated by many of the other 
knights, was to ensue the destruction of the whole band ; and the 
warning is already given. The presence of the Holy Graal is 
intimated by shadowy apparitions and thrilling voices ; and the full 
contemplation of the miraculous relic is announced as the crowning 
glory of chivalry. Fourthly, the " Questof the Saint Graal" tells how 
the knights, full of short-lived repentance and religious awe, scatter 
themselves on solitary wanderings to seek for the beatific vision ; 
how the sinners all return, unsuccessful and humbled ; but how at 
length the adventure is achieved by the young and unknown Sir 
Galahad, pure as well as knightly, and how he, while the vision 
passes before him, prays that he may live no longer, and is im- 



64 THE NOSMAN TIMES. 

mediately taken away from a world of calamity and sin. Fifthly, 
the " Mort Artus," or Death of Arthur, winds up, with tragic and 
supernatural horrors, the wild tale into which the fall of the 
ancient Britons had thus been transformed. The noblest of the 
champions perish in feuds, in which revenge was sought for mutual 
wrongs : and, after the fatal battle of Camlan, the survivors retire to 
convents or hermitages, to mourn over their sins and the ruin of 
their race. Arthur himself, wounded and dying, is carried by the 
Fairy of the Lake to the enchanted Isle of Avalon, there to dream 
away the ages that must elapse before he shall return to earth and 
reign over the perfected world of chivalry. Sixthly, of several 
romances which, though written after these, went back in the tale 
to interpolate new incidents and characters, the first part of the 
" Tristan," or Tristrem, alone requires notice here. The adventures 
of its hero are a repetition, with added impurities and new poetical 
beauties, of those which had been attributed to Lancelot of the 
Lake. 

4. The romances of this British cycle interest us through several 
circumstances, besides their national origin and their extraordinary 
power of poetic fascination. 

The six that have just been described, which were the originals 
of all the others, were "svritten, in the latter half of the tw^elfth cen- 
tury, for the English court and nobles, and some of them, it is said, 
on the suggestion of our King Henry the Second. Further, although 
they were composed in French, the authors of all of them were Eng- 
lishmen. The Saint Graal is attributed to Robert Borron, the first 
part of the Tristan to Luke Gast of Salisbury ; and aU the rest are 
assigned to Walter Mapes, whom we know as the leader of the 
Latin satu'ists. The cu'cumstances are curious ; and they are equally 
so, whether these men were of Norman or of Saxon descent : indeed, 
the distinction of races, which must have chiefly disappeared among 
the higher classes long before, was probably, by that time, beginning 
to lose its importance for the mass of the people. It is to be noted, 
likewise, that all our six romances are couched in prose ; a peculiarity 
which was hardly to have been looked for in early pieces of such a 
class, but which possibly may be supposed to have arisen from want 
of skill in French versification. Be this as it may, the twelfth cen- 
tury had not closed when Chretien of Troyes constructed several 
metrical romances, chiefly from the prose of our English authors, 
but with a good deal of invention ; and the stock was afterwards 
increased by other poets of France. 

The Metrical Romances in the English tongue, which celebrate 
Arthur and his Round Table, are (probably with no exception that 



SAXON-ENGLISH LITERATURE. C5 

is older than the fifteenth centurj'") translations, or, at the utmost, 
imitations, of those French romances in verse. Such are two of 
the finest, " Sir Perceval of Galles," and " Ywaine and Gawayne ;" 
and such also is the celebrated romance of " Sir Tristrem," which Sir 
Walter Scott claimed for the Scottish poet, Thomas of Ercildoune, 
on grounds which, now, are generally admitted to be unsatisfactory. 

But hardly any of the English translations, belonging to this 
series, was made till the fourteenth century. The Tristrem, in- 
deed, is the only one that was certainly translated earlier. 

There are, however, several extant romances, which may be 
regarded, though not without much allowance for modernizing by 
transcribers, as specimens of the language of English verse during 
the last thu'ty years of the thirteenth century, or the fii'st decade 
of the next. Such are " Havelok," " King Horn," and " Goeur de 
Lion," aU. from French originals lately referred to. Such is also 
the " King Alisaunder," one of the most spuited, but most auda- 
ciously inventive works of the kind. It devotes eight thousand lines 
to accoutring the Macedonian conqueror and his contemporaries 
in the garb of feudahsm, and transforming his wars into chivalrous 
adventures. To these should perhaps be added two extant romances 
on themes quite imaginary, " Ipomydon," and " Florise and Blanche- 
fieiu-." All these, with very many others of the Old English 
Romances, may be found by curious readers in modem reprints. 

SAXON-ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

5. Let us now turn back, to watch, somewhat closely, the vicissi- 
tudes which the Vernacular Literature had imdergone since the Con- 
quest interrupted its course. 

The ancient tongue of England decayed and died away. But it 
decayed as the healthy seed decays in the gTound ; and it vegetated 
again as the seed begins to grow, when the suns and the rains of 
spring have touched it. 

The clingmg to the old language, with an endeavour to resist 
the changes it was suffering, is very observable in one memorial of 
the times, marked otherwise by a spirit strongly adverse to the 
foreigners. The Saxon Chronicle was still carried on, in more than one 
of the monasteries. The desponding annalists, while preser^dng many 
valuable facts and setting down many shrewd remarks, recorded 
eagerly, not only oppressions and ^^olence, deaths and conflagra- 
tions, but omens which betokened evil to the aliens. They told how 
blood gushed out of the earth in Berkshire, near the native place 
of the immortal Alfred ; and how, while King Henry the First was 



QQ THE NORMAN TIMES. 

at sea, not long before his death, the sun was darkened at mid-day, 
and became like a new moon; and how, around the abbey of Peter- 
borough, (placed under a Norman Abbot, whom it was doubtless de- 
sirable to frighten,) horns were heard to blow in the dead of night, 
and black spectral huntsmen were seen to ride through the woods. 
It is curious, by the way, to observe, in this last story, an ingenious 
adaptation of the superstition of the Wild Hunt, which, in vari- 
ous shapes, was current for centuries throughout Germany. At 
length, when the Saxon language had fairly broken down with the 
last of the chroniclers, when French words intruded themselves in 
spite of him, and when, forgetting his native syntax, he wrote with- 
out grammar rather than adopt the detested innovations, the ven- 
erable record ceased abruptly, at the accession of Henry the Second. 

6. Our remains of the English tongue, in its state of Transition, 
are chiefly or without exception written in verse : and the versifica- 
tion shows, as instructively as the diction, the struggle between op- 
posing tendencies. Frequently, even in the romances and other 
translations, the Anglo-Saxon alliteration kept its gromid against 
the French rhymes. 

The most important group of these works throws us, once more, 
back on the Normans. 

In the course of the twelfth century, two Frenchmen, both of 
them residing in England, wrote Metrical Chronicles of our country. 
About the middle of the century was composed the '^ History of the 
Angles," (L'Estorie des Engies,) by Geoffrey Gaimar of Troyes, 
which comprehends the period from the landing of the West Saxons 
in the year 495, to the death of WiUiam the Red. It was not tran- 
slated or otherwise used by later English writers ; but it is histori- 
cally curious both for its matter and its sources. Its narrative, till 
near the close of the tenth century, is founded chiefly on the Saxon 
Chronicle, whose meaning, however, the foreigner has often mis- 
understood. The second chronicle, that of Eichard Wace, a native 
of Jersey, was completed in the second year of Henry the Second's 
reign. It is called " The Brut of England," (Le Brut d'Angleterre,) 
from Brutus, the fabulous founder of the British monarchy : and, 
following Geoffrey of Monmouth closely, it proceeds from the 
landing of the Trojans to the death of the Welsh prince Cadwal- 
lader in the j^-ear 689. 

About the beginning of the thirteenth century, or the end of the 
preceding, Layamon, a priest, living in the north of Worcestershire, 
composed, in the mixed Saxon of the day, his " Brut " or English 
Chronicle. This work deserves especial notice, alike as one of the 
fullest specimens of our early tongue, and on account of its eminent 



SAXON-ENGLISH LITERATURE. 67 

literary merit. It traverses the same ground as Wace's Chronicle, on 
which indeed it is founded in all its parts ; borrowing only a little 
from Bede, and a good deal from traditional or other authorities of 
a fabulous kind. It is not a translation of Wace, but rather an 
amplified imitation. It has more than double the bulk: it adds 
many legends to his : and, throughout, but especially in the earlier 
parts, it dramatizes speeches and incidents, and introduces, often 
with excellent effect, original descriptions and thoughts. The versi- 
fication is very pecuhar. The old alliteration prevails ; but there 
are many rhymmg couplets, many which are both rhymed and 
alHterative, and others that are neither. 

Since the recent publication of this venerable record, Layamon 
seems Hkely to be honom-ed as " The Enghsh Ennius." But this title 
had formerly been bestowed on Eobert of Gloucester, a metrical 
chronicler then known better. His work was probably completed 
about the close of the thh-teenth century, and certainly not three 
years earlier. Extending from Brutus to the death of Henry the 
Third, it foUows Geofirey of Monmouth so far as his work goes, 
adopting, as its chief authority afterwards, Wilham of Malmes- 
bury. It is in rhymed lines of fourteen syllables or seven accents, 
usually divisible into a couplet of the common measure of the 
psalms. Although it is much more than a mere translation, it 
shows exceedingly little of literary talent or skiU. 

There is still less of either in the last two of the metrical chronicles, 
in search of which, to complete the set, we may look forward into 
the fourteenth century. Soon after the death of Edward the First, 
a chronicle from Brutus to that date was written, in French verse, 
by Peter Langtoft, an ecclesiastic in Yorkshhe, who follows Geoffrey 
tiU the close of the Anglo-Saxon times. A little before the middle 
of the century was compiled, in English, the chronicle of Eobert 
Mannyng, called De Brunne from his birthplace in Lincolnshire. 
His book is entirely taken from two of the French authorities, used 
in succession, and each translated in the rhymed metre of the origi- 
nal. Thus he renders Wace into the romance-couplets of eight syl- 
lables or four accents, and Langtoft into Alexandrines. 

7, Of English Metrical remains, besides the romances and chron- 
icles, we have very few, and none of any importance, from the 
time between the Conquest and the middle of the twelfth century. 
It is to be observed, as a feature very important, that, on the revival 
of such compositions, after the latter of those dates, they imitated, 
from the beginning, the comparative simplicity and bareness of style 
that prevailed in the French pieces. The old Anglo-Saxon taste 
for obscure metaphor and pompous diction had entirely vanished. 



68 THE NOKMAN TIMES. 

The versification also shows, more decisively than that of the trans- 
lations that have been noticed, the progress from the ancient 
alliterative metres to those rhymed measures which, at first copied 
from the French, soon supplanted all the older forms. 

From the latter half of the twelfth century we have a composi- 
tion which its author, a canon of some priory in the east of England, 
whimsically called the " Ormulum," from his own name Ormin or Orm. 
The design, executed only in part, was that of constructing a kind of 
metrical harmony of those passages from the Gospels, which are con- 
tained in the service of the mass. It has less of poetical merit than 
of ingeiraity in reflection and allegory : but great praise has been be- 
stowed on its purity of doctrine ; and it is second only to Layamon 
as an instructive specimen of the Semi-Saxon stage of our tongue. 
Its measure is a line of fourteen syllables, or, more properly, of 
seven accents ; which is usually or always divisible into two lines, 
making a couplet of our common psalm-metre. The verses are 
unrhymed, and very imperfectly alliterative. 

Perhaps to the same time, and certainly to no later period than 
the close of Edward the First's reign, belongs the long fable of '■'■ The 
Owl and the Nightingale." This is one of the most pleasing of our 
early relics, easy in rhythm, and natural and lively in description. It 
is a contest for superiority of merit, carried on in dialogue between 
the two birds. The measure is that which is most common in the 
romances, and has been made familiar to us by Scott ; consisting of 
rhymed couplets, in which each line has eight syllables or four 
accents. Alliterative syllables also occur frequently as incidental 
ornaments ; a fashion very prevalent in our early poetry, even in 
pieces where rhymes chiefly prevailed. The poem has been attri- 
buted, on doubtful grounds, to an author otherwise unknown, called 
either Nicholas or John of Guildford. 

To the thirteenth century belong several small pieces by Michael 
of Kildare, the first Irishman who is known to have written verses 
in English ; and to him has been assigned, among others, the fre- 
quently quoted satirical poem, " The Land of Cockayne." Of anon- 
ymous poems, chiefly lyrical, composed towards the end of the cen- 
tury, many have been published ; some of which, both amatory and 
religious, are promising symptoms of the poetical success which 
was to distinguish the succeeding age. Of the same date are not a 
few metrical legends of the saints ; and Robert of Gloucester is said 
to have been the author of one large collection of these, the published 
specimens of which are, like his Chronicle, more curious than 
poetical. 

It should be recorded, also, that the origin of the Old English 



SAXON-ENGLISH LITEKATURE. 69 

Drama may be said to have been almost contemporaneous with the 
formation of the Old English Language. The earliest extant pieces 
are assigned to the close of Henry the Third's reign. But it is 
enough to note the fact in the way of parenthesis. The dramatic 
efforts of our ancestors were, till the sixteenth century, so exceed- 
ingly rude, that we may delay learning any thing in regard to this 
branch of our literature till we have emerged from the Middle Ages. 
They were designed exclusively for being acted, with no view, and 
as little aptitude, to the ordeal of reading : their spectators were 
the least instructed class of the community : and the ecclesiastics, 
in whose hands, (especially those of the monks,) the management 
of them long continued, confined them to sacred and moral themes ; 
and used them for communicating to the mass of the people such 
scraps of religious knowledge as it was thought right to impart. 



70 THE LITERATURE OP ENGLAND 



CHAPTEK V. 

THE LITEEATUEE OF ENGLAND IN THE FOUETEENTH 
CENTUEY. 

A. D. 1307— A. D. 1399. 

Edward IL, 1307-1327. 

Edward III., 1327-1377. 

Eichard IL, 1377-1399. 

iNTRODUCTioif. 1. Social and Literary Character of the Period. — Liteka- 
TUEE FROM 1307 TO 1350. 2. Occam's Philosophy — Ecclesiastics — English 
Poems. — Prose from 1350 to 1399. 3. Ecclesiastical Eeforms— John 
Wycliffe — His Translation of the Bible — Mandeville — Trevisa — Chaucer. 
— Poetry from 1350 to 1399. 4. Minor Poets — The Visions of Pierce 
Plowman — Character of their Inventions — Chivalrous Eomances. — 5. John 
Gower — His Works — Illustrations of the Confessio Amantis. — 6. Geoffrey 
Chaucer — His Life — His Studies and Literary Character. — 7. Chaucer's 
Metrical Translations and their Sources — His smaller Original Poems — 
The Flower and the Leaf. — 8. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — Their Plan — 
The Prologue — Description of the Pilgrims. — 9. The Stories told by the 
Canterbury Pilgrims — Their diversified Character, Poetical and Moral. 

1. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the afternoon and 
evening of the middle ages, are the picturesque period in EngKsh 
history. 

In the contemporary chronicle of Froissart, the reign of Edward 
the Thhd shines like a long array of knightly pageants ; and 
a loftier cast of imaginative adornment is imparted, by Shak- 
speare's historical dramas, to the troubled rule of the house of 
Lancaster, the savage wsirs of the Roses, and the crimes and fall of 
the short-lived dynasty of York. The characters and incidents of 
those stormy scenes, coloured so brilliantly in descriptions from 
which all of us derive, in one way or another, most of our current 
ideas in regard to them, wear, in their real outline, a striking air of 
irregular strength and greatness. But the admiring registrar of 
courtly pomps, and the philosophic poet of human nature, alike 
passed over in silence some of those circumstances of the times, that 
influenced most energetically the state of society and knowledge. 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 7 1 

It is with the fourteenth century only, that we are in the mean- 
time concerned. 

The reign of Edward the Second was as inglorious in literature, 
as it was in the history of the nation. That of his son, covering half 
of the century, was not more remarkable for the victories of Crecy 
and Poitiers, than for the triumphs then achieved in poetry and 
abstract thinking. The Black Prince, our model of historic 
chivalry, and Occam, the last and greatest of our scholastic philo- 
sophers, lived in the same century with Chaucer, the father of Eng- 
lish poetical literature, and WycMe, the herald of the Protestant 
Reformation. In the reign of Richard the Second, the insurrection 
of the peasants gave token of deep-seated evils for which the 
remedy was distant ; while the more powerful classes, thinking 
themselves equally aggrieved, sought for redress through a change 
of dynasty, and thus prepared the way for several generations of 
consphacy and bloodshed. 

LITERATURE FROM 1307 TO 1350. 

2. The earlier half of this century may conveniently be regarded, 
in all its literary relations, as a separate period from the later. The 
genius of the nation, which had already shown symptoms of weari- 
ness, seemed now to have fallen asleep. 

England, it is true, became the birthplace of " The Invincible 
I. ab. 1300. ) Doctor," William Occam. But this distinguished 

d. 1347. j thinker neither remained in his own country, nor im- 
parted any strong impulse to his countrymen. Educated abroad, he 
lived chiefly in France, and died at Munich. While the writings 
of his master Duns Scotus were then the chief authorities of the 
metaphysical sect called ReaHsts, Occam himself was the ablest, as 
weU as one of the earliest, among the Nominalists. In regard to his 
position, it must here be enough to say, that the question to which 
these technical names refer, was considered by the schoolmen to be 
the great problem of philosophy, and was discussed with a vehe- 
mence for which we cannot sufficiently account, without knowing 
that the metaphysical speculations of the middle ages were always 
conducted with an immediate regard to their bearings on theology. 
Realism was held to be especially favourable to the distinctive 
doctrines which had then been developed in the Roman Catholic 
church. Nominalism, on the contrary, was discouraged not only as 
novel but as heretical ; and Occam was persecuted for having been 
the first to enunciate clearly opinions which, in modern times, are 
held, in one shape or another, by almost all metaphysicians. 



72 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

Meanwhile, the English ecclesiastics were not very eminent for 
speculative ability, and still less so for accuracy in classical know- 
ledge. Three of the theological writers have some claim to notice 
in the history of philosophy. The Augustinian canon Robert Holcot 
was one of the few Nominalists of his day ; while on the other side 
stood Archbishop Bradwardine, an able controversialist, and Walter 
Burleigh, a commentator on Aristotle. It is in a dearth of attempts 
at classical composition, that such names are cited as that of 
Richard Angarville or De Bury, bishop of Durham, author of a 
gossiping essay on books, (the Philobiblon,) and likely to be 
longer remembered for having been one of the earliest of our book- 
collectors. 

Nor have we any distinguished names in the literature of the 
spoken tongue, which as yet had not taken the form of prose. 
Mannyng's Chronicle has already been noticed. Richard RoUe, 
usually called the hermit of Hampole, and Adam Davie of Stratford- 
le-bow, were writers of religious poems, which are not alleged by 
the most zealous antiquaries to possess any literary merit. 

But the dawn of English literature was close at hand. The 
star which preceded its approach had already risen on the birth 
of Chaucer. He attained to early manhood in the close of the 
short period at which we have glanced; and the generation to 
which he belonged inherited a language that had become adequate 
to all literary uses. They were about to record in it high achieve- 
ments of genius* as well as precious lessons of knowledge. 

PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1350 TO 1399. 

3. We pass to the latter half of the century, an era never to be 
forgotten either in the history of our intellectual or in that of our 
ecclesiastical progress. 

The prevalence of metaphysical studies, in the thirteenth cen- 
tury, has been alleged as a main cause of that decay in accuracy 
of classical scholarship, which was abeady observable in England. 
From philosophical pursuits, in their turn, the attention of the clergy 
was now called away by matters more practical and exciting. 

Learning had several munificent patrons, whose benefactions still 
survive. We must be satisfied with being able to note, in the course 
of the century, the foundation of several colleges at Oxford and 
Cambridge, with that of Winchester by the bishop and chancellor 
William of Wykeham. 

Notwithstanding these and other tokens of prosperity, the state 
of the church was viewed with great dissatisfaction in many quarters. 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 73 

The increase of the papal power led to claims which, affecting the 
emoluments of the ecclesiastics, were resisted by many of them, as 
well as by the parliament, now systematically organized. . Against 
abuses in discipline, indignant remonstrances arose, not only from 
the laity, but among the churchmen themselves ; being prompted 
both by the pure zeal which animated some, and also by the rivalry 
which always prevailed between the secular priests and the monastic 
orders, especially the Mendicant Friars. 

Foremost among those who called for reforms in the church, 
b. ab. 1324. \ stood the Celebrated John Wycliffe, a native of York- 
d. 1384. j shhe. Becoming a priest, and attaining high fame 
for his knowledge and logical dexterity in dealing with philosophical 
and theological questions, he was placed at the head, first of one and 
then of another, of the colleges of Oxford. There, and afterwards 
from the country parsonages to which he was compelled to retreat, 
he thundered forth a series of denunciations, which gradually in- 
creased in boldness. At length, from exposing the ignorance and 
profligacy of the begging friars, and advocating the independence of 
the nation against the financial usurpations of the Eoman see, he 
went so far as to attack the papal supremacy in all its relations, to 
deny several doctrines distinctively Komish, and to set forth in 
fragments doctrinal views of his own, which diligent students of his 
vrorks have interpreted as making a near approach to Calvinism. 

Although Wycliffe was repeatedly called to account for his 
opinions, he was never so much as imprisoned ; and he retained his 
church-livings to the last. The papal hierarchy was then weakened 
by the Great Schism; and he was protected by the king's son, John of 
Gaunt, as well as by other powerful nobles. But, not long after 
his death, there bm-st on his disciples a storm of persecution, which 
crushed dissent till the sixteenth century; and his writings, both 
Latin and English, preserved by stealth only, had by that time 
become difficult of identification. 

We are sure, at least, of owing to him, either w^hoUy or in great 
part, the Version of the Holy Scriptures which bears his name, and 
which is still extant, and may now be read in print. There seems 
to be no reason for doubting, that this was the first time the Bible 
was completely rendered into the English tongue. The date of the 
composition appears to have been soon after the year 1380. The 
translation is from the Latin Vulgate, the received text of the Rom- 
ish church. It has been remarked, with justice, that the language of 
Wycliffe's original compositions in English shows little advance, 
if any, beyond the point which had been reached in the early part 
of the century ; but that his Bible, on which probably greater pains 



74 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

were bestowed, is very far superior, though still ruder than several 
other compositions of the same date. Indeed, besides the reverence 
due to it as a monument in the religious history of oui* nation, it 
possesses high philological value, as standing all but first among 
the prose ^Titings in our old tongue. 

Our very oldest book in English prose, however, is the account given 
by Su* John Mandeville of his travels in the East, from which he had 
returned about the year 1355. It is an odd and amusing compound 
of facts correctly observed and minutely described, vnih marvellous 
stories' gathered during the writer's thirty-three years of wandering. 
Soon afterwards, John De Trevisa, a canon residing in Gloucester-^ 
shire, began a series of translations from the Latin, of which the 
most remarkable were the ancient law-treatise bearing the name of 
GlanvUe, and the Polychronicon recently written by Ealph Higden, 
which is a history of the world from the creation. But the prose 
writings of the time, which exhibit the language in the most favour- 
able light, are decidedly those of the poet Chaucer, Besides 
translating Boethius, he has bequeathed to us in prose an imitation 
of that work, caUed " The Testament of Love," with two of his 
Canterbury Tales, and an astrological treatise. 

POETICAL LITERATURE FROM 1350 TO 1399. 

4. The principal writings of Chaucer belong to the last few years 
of the century ; and, in examining hastily a few of the minor poems 
of his time, several of which appeared considerably earlier, we are 
preparing om-selves for understanding the better what our obliga- 
tions to him have been. 

Highest by far in point of genius, as weU as most curious for its 
illustrations of manners and opinions, was the long and singular 
poem usually called " The Visions of Piers Plowman," written or 
completed in 1362, by a priest or monk named Robert Langland. 
The poet supposes himself, falling asleep on the Malvern Hills, to 
see a series of visions, which are descriptive, chiefly in an allegori- 
cal shape, of the vices of the times, especially those which prevailed 
among the ecclesiastics. The plan is confused ; so much so, indeed, 
that it is not easy to discover, how the common title of the poem 
should be justified by the part assigned in it to the character of the 
Ploughman. But the poetical vigour of many of the passages is 
extraordinary, not only in the satirical vein which colours most of 
them, but in bm'sts of serious feeling and sketches of external nature. 
It has been compared with the PUgrun's Progi-ess ; and the likeness 
lies much deeper than in the naming of such personages as Do-weU, 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 75 

Do-better, and Do-best, by which the parallel is most obviously 
suggested. Some of the allegories are whimsically ingenious, and 
are worth notice as specimens of a kind of inventions appearing 
everywhere in the poetr}^ of the Middle Ages. The Lady Aniraa, 
who represents the Soul of Man, is placed by Kind, that is Nature, 
in a castle called Caro or the Flesh ; and the charge of it is com- 
mitted to the constable Sir In-wit, a wise knight, whose chief offi- 
cers are his five sons. See-well, Say-well, Hear-well, Work-well, 
and Go-well. One of the other figures is Reason, who preaches in 
the church to the king and his knights, teachmg that all the evils 
of the realm are because of sin ; and among the Vices, who are con- 
verted by the sermon, we see Proud-heart, who vows to wear hair- 
cloth ; Envy, lean, cowering, biting his lips, and wearing the sleeves 
of a friar's frock ; and •Covetousness, a bony, beetle-browed, blear- 
eyed, ill-clothed caitiff. Mercy and Truth are two fair maidens ; 
and the Diseases, the foragers of Nature, are sent out from the 
planets by the command of Conscience, before whom Old Age bears 
a banner, while Death in his chariot rides after him. Conscience is 
besieged by Antichrist, who, with his standard-bearer Pride, is 
more kindly received by a fraternity of monks, ringing their con- 
vent-bells, and marching out in procession to greet their master. 
It may be noticed that, in the beginning of the poem, an ingenious 
use is made of the fable of the cat and the bell, which we discovered 
lately among the Latin stories of the monastic library. 

The language of this curious old monument wears an air of anti- 
quity beyond its age ; which, however, may be attributable to the 
difficulties caused by the affectation of antiquity in the versification. 
It is in effect a revival of the alliterative system of metre, which still 
survived in some romances of the day, and was afterwards used in 
many imitations prompted by the popularity of Langland. The 
best of these, " Piers Plowman's Creed," a piece in every way 
inferior to the original, was written towards the close of the century, 
and is avowedly the effusion of a Wycliffite. 

The very many Chivalrous Romances which were now added to 
the English tongue, deserve a passing notice, not only for the merit 
really possessed by not a few of them, but also on account of the 
good-humoured jests levelled at them by Chaucer, himself in no 
small degree affected both by their spirit and theh diction. There 
is less reason for dwelling on the poems, not devoid of spirit, in which 
Laurence Minot celebrated the French wars of Edward the Third, 
and found means, in treating of his patron's successes in Scotland, to 
suggest consolations for the bloody field lost there by his father. 

5. One of the best of our minor poets, and very interesting for 



76 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

many relations to our more recent literature, was John Gower, the 
d. ab. ) " ancient Grower " of Shakspeare, with whom Chaucer, his 
1408. J contemporary and friend, did not disdain to exchange borrow- 
ings. It is worth noting that Gower, a man of much knowledge, 
wrote in three languages ; though he is remembered, not for his French 
or Latin verses, but for his " Confessio Amantis," or " Lover's 
Confession," a huge English poem in the octosyllabic romance- 
metre. It is a miscellaneous collection of physical, metaphysical, 
and ethical reflections, and of stories cuUed from the common 
repertories of the middle ages. All these are bound together by a 
fantastic thread, in which a lover makes his shrift to a priest of 
Venus, named Genius, and receives advice and consolation from his 
anomalous confessor. The faults are general tediousness, and a 
strong tendency to feebleness : but the language is smooth and 
easy; and there is not a little that is exceedingly agreeable in 
description. 

Of Gower's manner in his didactic strain, a specimen is furnished 
in the First Book, in a passage where the theme of the dialogue is, 
the moral danger arising from the two principal senses, seeing and 
hearing. The duty which is thus imposed on us, is illustrated by a 
piece of fabulous science, evidently derived from a misunderstood 
scriptural saying. There is (so Genius instructs his pupil) a serpent 
named Aspidis, who bears in his head the precious stone called the 
carbuncle, which enchanters strive to win from him by lulling him 
asleep through magic songs. The wise reptile, as soon as the 
charmer approaches, lays himself down with one ear pressed flat on 
the ground ; while he covers the other with his tail. So ought we ob- 
stinately to refuse admission to all evil impressions presented through 
the bodily organs. Perhaps there is not here any such depth of 
thiaking, as should entitle us to expect much edification from the 
Seventh Book, which is wholly a treatise on Philosophy, as it was 
learned by Alexander the Great from the philosophers and astrol- 
ogers who were his tutors. Yet a good principle is involved in 
that mediaeval classification which the poem lays down, dividing 
philosophy into three branches, the theoretical, the practical, and 
the rhetorical. 

Of the narratives of the " Confessio" we may gain a fair notion, 
by glancing at some of those which it takes from the '^ Gesta Ro- 
manorum," The longest and best-told of them is the " Apollonius 
of Tyre," which has already been noticed, and may be understood 
from Shakspeare. The dramatist's tale of the Caskets is here, though 
in a less poetical dress. "We have also an account of the female 
disguise put on by Achilles to evade the Trojan war. The tale of 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 77 

Florent is very like that which Chaucer assigns to the Wife of 
Bath. The " Trumpet of Death" deserves notice for its striking 
tone of reflection. The outhne is this. It was a law in Hungary, 
that, when a man was adjudged to die, the sentence should be an- 
nounced to him by the blast of a brazen trumpet before his house. 
At a magnificent court-festival, the king was plunged in deep mel- 
ancholy ; and his brother asked the reason. No answer was re- 
tm'ned ; but, at daybreak next morning, the fatal trumpet sounded 
at the brother's gate. The condemned man came to the palace 
weeping and despairing. Then the king said solemnly; that, if 
such grief was caused by the expectation of the death of the body, 
much more profound sorrow could not but be awakened by the 
thought which had afflicted him as he sat among his guests ; the 
thought of that eternal death of the soul, which Heaven has 
ordained as the just punishment of sin. 

6. The few facts which we know positively in regard to Geoffrey 
h. ab. 1328. ) Chaucer, throw very little light on his early history ; 
d.im). J Q^^^ jjj^ regard to his writings, they enable us to see 
only, that these were but part of the occupation of a long life fruit- 
ful in activity and vicissitude. He was born in London, and prob- 
ably educated for the law : and, being thrown at an early age into 
public employment, he attained to confidential intimacy with men of 
high rank, in whose good and bad fortune he was equally a sharer. 
His chief patron was John of G-aunt ; who, in his declinuig years, 
contracted a marriage, no way creditable, with the sister of the 
poet's wife. In his thirty-first year, Chaucer served in the French 
war, and was taken prisoner ; and afterwards he received and lost 
several public offices and pensions, and was repeatedly employed 
in embassies both to France and Italy. There are symptoms of 
his having, in his old age, suffered poverty and neglect ; and he 
scarcely survived to profit by the accession of Henry the Fourth, 
the son of his old patron. 

The indignant freedom with which Chaucer exposes ecclesiastical 
abuses, was, as we have seen, common and long-rooted among 
literary men. Accordingly it does not require to be accounted for, 
by his dependence on the aristocratic party who advocated reforms 
in the church ; nor is there, in the whole series of his works, any- 
thing entitling us to rank him among those who decidedly aban- 
doned the distinctive doctrines of Romanism. John of Gaunt 
himself shrunk back from Wycliffe, when he ventured on his 
boldest steps; and Chaucer did not show, more than Langland, 
any leaning to the theological opinions of the reformer. His busy 
and adventurous life, however, prepares us for that practical shrewd- 



78 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

ness, which is one of the most marked features in his writings : and 
his foreign travels, while they were not needed to make him familiar 
with French literatiu-e, gave him opportmiities for acquiring an 
acquaintance with the language and poetry of Italy, of which his 
works exhibit, in the face of all doubts that have been started, clear 
and numerous proofs. 

7. The frequency of translations and imitations is a striking 
characteristic in the poetry of the middle ages. The grave refer- 
ence, which the poets so frequently make, to books as their autho- 
rities for facts, was much more than a rhetorical flourish. A very 
large proportion of Chaucer's writings consists of free versions from 
the Latin and French, and perhaps also from the Italian ; and in 
some of these he has incorporated so much that is his own, as to 
make them the most valuable and celebrated of his works. The 
originals which he chose were not the Chivalrous Romances, but 
the comic Fabliaux, (ah'eady very common in Latin as weU as in 
living tongues,) and also an allegorical kind of poetry which the 
Trouveres now cultivated ardently, deriving its character in great 
part from the Troubadom*s. The Italian literature fm*nislied him 
with models of a higher class, which, however, he put much more 
sparingly to use. Its poets, taking their first lessons from Provence, 
had recently founded a school of then- own, equally gTeat for inven- 
tion and for skill in art. But the awful vision of Dante furnished 
to Chaucer nothing beyond a few allusions and descriptions ; and he 
was too wise and sober-minded to be carried away by the lyrical 
abstractions of Petrarch, if he really knew much of them. He seems 
to have derived from fabliaux, or other French or Latin sources, 
those stories of his which are to be fomid among the prose novels 
of Boccaccio ; whose metrical works, however, we cannot doubt 
that he studied and imitated. 

Tlu-ee of the largest of Chaucer's minor works are thus borrowed: 
the allegorical " Romance of the Rose," translated, with abridgment, 
from one of the most popular French poems of the preceding cen- 
tury ; the Troilus and Cressida, avowedly a translation, but a very 
free one, if its original really was the Filostrato of Boccaccio ; and The 
Legend of Good Women, a series of narratives, foimded on Ovid's 
Epistles. The Troilus, certainly among his earliest poems, is one 
of his best, notwithstanding the disgusting tenor of the story. The 
same theme, it will be remembered, is handled by Shakspeare, in a 
drama adorned by some of his most brilliant flowers of imagination, 
and inspired throughout with deep though despondent reflection. 
The choice of such a subject by the later of these two great poets 
is less to be wondered at than its adoption by the other, who 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 79 

lived in a time that was much ruder, in sentiments as well as in 
manners. 

Of the minor poems which appear to be entirely Chaucer's own, 
several, such as those which celebrate, in imaginative disguise, pas- 
sages in the history of his royal patron, are, hke most of the transla- 
tions, chiefly interesting as proofs of the great mastery he had acquired 
over an imperfectly cultivated language. Nor, it must be said, would 
his fame be mjured by the loss of any of them, except the fine allegori- 
cal inA^entions of The House of Fame, and The Flower and the Leaf ; 
the former of which has received gTeat injustice in its showy moderni- 
zation by Pope, while the other also has suffered in the hands of 
Dryden. The structm-e of the latter of the two may serve to illus- 
trate a kind of poetry, of which the Romance of the Rose was the 
most celebrated example, but which, throughout the later part of 
the middle ages, w^as equally popular among the poets and among 
their readers. The piece could not well be described more aptly, 
than in the prose sentences, very slightly altered, which the author 
prefixed to it as an explanatory argument or analysis. " A gentle- 
woman, out of an arbour in a grove, seeth a great company of 
knights and ladies in a dance upon the green grass : the which 
being ended, they aR kneel down and do honour to the Daisy, some 
to the Flower, and some to the Leaf. Afterward this gentlewoman 
learneth by one of these ladies the meaning of the vision, which is 
this. They which honour the Flower, a thing fading with every 
blast, are such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure. But 
they that honour the Leaf, which abideth with the root notwith- 
standing the frosts and winter-storms, are they which follow virtue 
and enduring qualities, without regard of worldly respects." 

8. The poetical immortality of Chaucer rests on his Canterbury 
Tales, which are a series of independent stories, linked together by 
an ingenious device. 

A party of about thirty persons, the poet being one, are bound 
on a pilgrimage from London, to the tomb of Thomas a Becket at 
Canterbury. They meet at the inn of the Tabard, in Southwark, 
the host of which joins the cavalcade, and assumes the post of 
director. Each person is to tell two tales, the one m going, the 
other in returning: but we are allowed only to accompany the 
travellers on a part of the journey to Canterbury, and to hear 
twenty-fom- of then- stories. The work is thus no more than a 
fragment ; although its metrical part extends to more than seventeen' 
thousand lines, being thus longer than the Iliad, and not far from 
twice as long as the Paradise Lost. It contains allusions bringing us 
down to a date considerably beyond the poet's sixtieth year : but 



80 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

Ave can hardly suppose the whole to have been a fruit of old age. 
It is more probable that a good many of the tales had been written 
separately, long before ; while others may have been added when 
the design of forming the collection was taken up, to be left un- 
completed amidst the misfortunes which darkened the author's 
declining years. 

The Prologue, which relates the occasion of the assemblage, and 
describes the company, is in itself a poem of no small bulk, and of 
admhable merit. Here no allowance has to be made for obliga- 
tions to preceding inventors ; and a strength is manifest, which in- 
comparably exceeds any that was put forth when the poet had 
foreign aid to lean on. He draws up the curtain from a scene of 
life and manners, such as the whole compass of our subsequent 
literature has not surpassed; a picture whose figures have been 
studied with the truest observation, and are outlined with the 
fi.rmest, and yet most delicate pencil. The tone of sentiment, never 
rising into rapture or passion, is always unaffectedly cheerful and 
manly; while it frequently deviates, on the one hand, into the 
keenest and most lively turns of humour, and, on the other, into 
intervals of touching seriousness ; and, over the whole, the imagina- 
tion of high genius has thrown the indescribable charm, which at 
once animates external nature with the spirit of human feeling, and 
brightens our dim thoughts of our own mental being with a light 
like that which illmninates the corporeal world around us. 

A mere catalogue of the Pilgrims, who are thus vigorously de- 
scribed, would be an inventory of the English society pf the day, 
in all ranks, except the very highest and the very lowest. There 
is a Knight, with his son, a young Squire. These two represent the 
chivalry of the times ; and they are described, especially the latter, 
in the poet's best strain of gayly romantic fancy. They are attended 
by a Yeoman, a master of forest-craft. After them in rank comes 
a Franklin or country-gentleman, who is a justice and has often 
been knight of the shire. The peasantry are represented by three 
men ; a Ploughman, described briefly and kindly ; a Miller, whose 
portrait is a wonderfully animated piece of rough satirical humour ; 
and a Reeve or bailiff, whose likeness is an excellent specimen of quiet 
sarcasm, relieved by nue touches of rural scenery. There is a whole 
swarm of ecclesiastical persons, at whose expense the poet indulges 
his love of shrewd humour without any check. The Prioress of a con- 
vent, affected, mincing, and sentimental, is attended by a Nun and 
three Priests : the Benedictine Monk is already known familiarly to 
most of us, being the original of the self-indulgent Abbot of Jorvaulx 
in Ivanhoe : in contrast to him stands the coarse and popular Beg- 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 81 

ging- Friar, " a wanton and a merry : " and a Sompnour or officer 
of the church courts is yoked with a Pardoner or seller of indulgences. 
Last among the members or retainers of the church, is to be named 
a poor Secular Priest from a country village, who is described with 
warmly affectionate respect. The learning of the times has three 
representatives : the Clerk of Oxford is a gentle student, silent, 
thoughtful, and unworldly ; the Sergeant-of-law is sententious, alert, 
and affectedly immersed in important business ; and the Doctor of 
Physic is fond of money, skilful in practice, and versed in aU sciences 
except theology. The trading and manufacturing sections of the 
community furnish several figures to the picture. Their aristocracy 
contains the Merchant, and the Wife of Bath, described with a keen- 
ness so inimitable : a meaner group is composed of the Haberdasher, 
Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, and Tapestry-maker, with the Cook whom 
these have providently brought to attend them ; and this part of 
the company is completed by a Shipman or mariner, and a Manciple 
or purveyor of one of the inns of court. These, with the Poet and 
the Host of the Tabard, are the world-renowned Pilgrims of Can- 
terbury. 

9. In some of the tales which follow, the tone rises from the 
familiar reality of the Prologue to the highest flight of heroic, 
reflective, and even religious poetry : in others, it sinks not only 
into the coarseness of expression which deformed so much of our 
early literature, but into a positive licentiousness of thought and 
sentunent. Most of the humorous stories, and more than one of 
the scenes by which they are knit together, are quite unpresentable 
to young readers. 

The series opens with the Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite, 
which, founded on an Italian poem of Boccaccio, has been modern- 
ized by Dryden, and made the groundwork of a striking drama 
sometimes attributed to Shakspeare. It is worthy of the delighted 
admiration with which poetical minds have always regarded it. It 
is the noblest of all chivalrous romances. Or, rather, it stands alone 
in our language, as a model of that which the romances might have 
been, but are not; symmetrical and harmonious, while they are 
undigested and harsh; full of clearness and brilliancy and sug- 
gestiveness, in its portraiture of adventures and characters which 
to the minstrels would have prompted only vague and indistinct 
sketches. This, a metamorphosed legend of Thebes and Athens, 
borrowing its first hints from the Latin poet Statins, is an in- 
structive example of the manner in which the classical fables and 
history were disguised, in romantic trappings, by the poets of the 
middle ages. We shall learn something more in regard to it, 

d2 



82 THE LITEEATUKE OF ENGLAND 

when we come to this point in reviewing the progress of the Eng- 
lish Language. 

The Squire's Tale, a tantalizing fragment, traverses another walk 
of romance, ushering us into a world of oriental marvels, some 
of which are identical with those of the Arabian Nights. Milton, 
whose fancy was keenly impressed by its picturesqueness, chooses 
it as his example of Chaucer's poetry ; and he works up its figures 
into one of his most exquisite compositions of lyrical imagery. 
He wishes that it were possible, for the solace of his studious leisure. 

" To call up him that left half-told 
The story of Cambuscan bold, 
Of Camball, and of Algarsife, 
And who had Canace to wife, 
That OAvn'd the virtuous ring and glass ; 
And of the wondrous horse of brass. 
On which the Tartar king did ride : 
— And if aught else great bards beside 
In sage and solemn tunes have sung. 
Of tourneys and of trophies hung, 
Of forests, and enchantments drear. 
Where more is meant than meets the ear." 

The tale told by the Wife of Bath is a comic romance, the scene 
of which is laid at the court of King Arthm*, and adorned with fairy 
transformations. The hero is required, on pain of death, to answer 
correctly a question proposed by the queen, what it is that women 
most desire ; and he is taught by his ^vife to say, that they desire 
most of all to rule their husbands. Here the chivalrous recollections 
of the Eound Table are used only as the occasion of one of those 
satires on the female sex, which abound so much in the Gesta, (the 
original of the story,) and in all the lighter compositions of the 
monks. Accordingly, it may not unfairly be regarded as the poet's 
protest against the popular tastes for the wilder of the romantic 
fictions. The same spirit becomes yet more decided in the rhyme 
of Sir Topas, the story which he supposes to be his own contribu- 
tion to the common stock. It is a spmted parody on the ro- 
mances, expressed chiefly in their own forms of speech ; and the 
humour is heightened by the indignation with which the host, in- 
tolerant of attacks on the literature he best understood, arbitrarily 
puts a stop to its recitation. It tells us how the hero, a knight fair 
and gentle, fell in love with the queen of Fairyland ; and how he 
rode through many a wild forest, ready to fight with giants if he 
should meet with any. The rude interruption prevents us, im- 
luckily, from learning whether he was fortunate enough to find an 
opportunity of proving his valour. 

The learned and gentle Clerk relates the story of Griselda, which 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 83 

used to be made known to ali of us in our nursery-libraries, and 
whose harshness is concealed, in the poem, by a singular sweetness 
of description, and touches of the tenderest feeling. It is one of the 
poet's master-pieces, and owes exceedingly little either to Petrarch, 
who is referred to as the authority, or to Boccaccio, whose prose 
narrative has by some been supposed to have really been the original. 

We are raised almost into the sphere of religious poetry in the 
Man of Law's Tale, the history of Constance, which relates adven- 
tures used again and again in the romances, but found by all of 
them in the Gesta. The heroine, a daughter of the Emperor of 
Rome, becomes the wife of Ella, the Saxon king of Northumber- 
land, and converts him and his subjects to the Christian faith. 
Twice exposed by malicious enemies in a boat which drifts through 
stormy seas, and accompanied in one of those perilous voyages by 
her infant child, she is twice providentially preserved ; and on an- 
other occasion, when she is about to be executed on a false charge 
of murder, an invisible hand smites the accuser dead, and a voice 
from the sky proclaims her innocence. The legend of Saint 
Cecilia, told by one of the Nuns, is purely a devotional composition : 
and of the same cast, with much greater poetical beauty, is the 
short story related by the Prioress, of the pious child slain by the 
Jews, the pathos of which makes us forget that the poet, in telling 
it, was fostering one of the worst prejudices of his age. 

The two Prose Tales, which stand so oddly among the metrical 
ones, are in several respects curious. The Story of Melibeus, which 
the Poet represents himself as substituting for his unpopular rhymes, 
suspends, on a feeble thread of narrative, a mass of ethical reflec- 
tions, recommending the duty of forgiving injuries. That which is 
called the Tale of the Parson or Priest, the piece with which the 
collection abruptly ends, is in fact a sermon, and a very long one, 
inculcating the obligation, and explaining with minute subdivisions 
the laws and effects, of the Romish sacrament of penance. 



84 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 



CHAPTEK VI. 

THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, 
AND OF SCOTLAND IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH. 

A. D. 1399— A. D. 1509 ; and a. d. 1306— a. d. 1513. 

England. j Scotland. 

Eobert the Bruce, 1306-1329. 

David II., 1329-1370. 

Eobert IL, 1370-1390. 

Eobert III., 1390-1406. 

James I., 1406-1437. 

James II., 1437-1460. 

James III., 1460-1488. 

James IV., 1488-1513. 



Henry IV., 1399-1413. 

Henry v., 1413-1422. 

Henry VL, 1422-1461. 

Edward IV., 1461-1483. 

Edward v., 1483. 

EichardllL, 1483-1485. 

Henry VII., 1485-1509. 



England. 1. Poetry — John Lydgate— His Storie of Thebes. — 2. Lyd- 
gate's Minor Poems — Character of his Opinions and Feelings — Eelapse 
into Monasticism — Specimens. — 3. Stephen Hawes — Analysis of his Pas- 
time of Pleasure. — 4. The Latest Metrical Eomances— The Earliest Bal- 
lads — Chevy Chase — Eobin Hood. — 5. Prose — Literary Dearth — Patrons 
of Learning — Hardyng — William Caxton — His Printing-Press and its 
Fruits. — Scotland. 6. Eetrospect — Michael Scot — Thomas the Ehymer. 
— 7. The Fourteenth Century — John of Fordun — Wyntoun's Chronicle 
— The Bruce of Jolm Barbour — Its Literary Merit — Its Language. — 
8. The Fifteenth Century— The King's Quair— Blind Harry the Minstrel 
— Brilliancy of Scottish Poetry late in the Century — Henryson — His 
Testament of Cressida — Gawain Douglas — His "Works. — 9. William Dun- 
bar — His Genius and Poetical Works — Scottish Prose still wanting — 
Universities founded — Printing in Edinburgh. 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND. 

1. The miseries which afflicted England during the greater part of 
the fifteenth century, thinly veile^ in Shakspeare's heroic pictures, 
darken frightfully the true annals of the country. The unjust 
and unwise wars with France, made illustrious for the last time by 
Henry the Fifth, had their issue under his feeble son in national 
disgrace. Fresh revolts of the populace were followed by furious 
wars between the partisans of the two royal houses, till the rival 
claims were united in the family of Tudor. The unnatural contest, 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 85 

desolating the land as it had not been desolated since the Norman 
invasion, blighted and dwarfed all intellectual growth. For more 
than a hundred years after Chaucer's death, our literary records do 
not set down any name the loss of which would at all diminish 
their lustre, unless Dan John of Bury may deserve to be excepted. 

Tn short, this age, usually marked in Continental history as the 
epoch of the Revival of Classical Learning, was not with us a time 
either of erudition or of original invention. 

The fifteenth century has transmitted to us a large number of 
Poetical Compositions ; but most of them are quite valueless, unless 
as instructive specimens of the rapidity with which the language 
was undergoing the latest of the changes, that developed it into 
Modern English. Although, likewise, we know the names of many 
of the authors, two of these only call for notice. 
d. bef. \ John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of Bury Saint Ed- 
1461. J lYiunds, beginning to write before Chaucer's death, appears 
to have laboured for more than halfa century, producing an immense 
number of compositions, many of which were of a temporary kind. 
His most ambitious works were three. The Fall of Princes is versi- 
fied from the Latin prose of Boccaccio ; the Storie of Thebes is an 
additional Canterbury Tale, borrowing a great deal from Statins and 
other classical sources, but investing the unhappy sons of (Edipus 
in chivalrous drapery, not without much spirit and picturesque- 
ness ; and, in the Troy Book, the fall of Ilium is similarly dealt with, 
and adorned with many striking descriptions. 

Some features in the Storie of Thebes are thus described by 
the earliest historian of our old poetry. 

" This poem is the Thebaid of a Troubadour. The old classical 
Tale of Thebes is here clothed with feudal manners, enlarged with 
new fictions of the Gothic species, and furnished with the descrip- 
tions, circumstances, and machineries, appropriated to a romance of 
chivalry. The Sphinx is a terrible dragon, placed by a necromancer 
to guard a mountain, and to murder all travellers passing by. Ty- 
deus, being wounded, sees a castle on a rock, whose high towers 
and crested pinnacles of polished stone glitter by the light of the 
moon : he gains admittance, is laid in a sumptuous bed of cloth of 
gold, and healed of his wounds by a king's daughter. Tydeus and 
Polymite tilt at midnight for a lodging, before the gate of the palace 
of King Adrastus ; who is awakened by the din of the strokes of their 
weapons, and descends into the court with a long train by torch- 
light. He orders the two combatants to be disarmed, and clothed 
in rich mantles studded with pearls; and they are conducted to 
repose, by many a stair, to a stately tower, after bemg served with 



86 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

a refection of hippocras from golden goblets. The next day they 
are both espoused to the king's two daughters, and entertained with 
tournaments, feasting, revels, and masques. Afterwards, Tydeus, 
having a message to deliver to Eteocles, king of Thebes, enters the 
hall of the royal palace, completely armed and on horseback, in the 
midst of a magnificent festival. This palace, like a Norman for- 
tress or feudal castle, is guarded with barbicans, portcullises, chains, 
and fosses. Adrastus wishes to close his old age in the repose of 
rural diversions, of hawking and hunting."* 

2. Lydgate is justly charged with diffuseness. He accumulates, 
to wearisomeness, both thoughts and words. But he has an earnest- 
ness which often rises into enthusiasm, and wliich gives a very 
impressive air to the religious pieces that make up a majority of 
his minor poems. Although his originality of invention is small, 
he sometimes works up borrowed ideas into exceedingly striking 
combinations. His descriptions of scenery are often excellent. 

Some of his smaller compositions illustrate, very instructively, 
both the literary and the theological character of his time. The 
survey which we have now nearly completed of the literature of the 
middle ages, has furnished frequent examples of a fact learned by 
us in the commencement of om* present studies ; namely, that al- 
most all the Kterary productions of those times fall into groups, 
each of them designed and fitted only for a limited audience. 
Neither comprehensive observation of society at large, nor a wish 
to instruct or please a wide and diversified circle of readers, has 
shown itself in any of the periods we have examined, till we reached 
the time of Chaucer. He, indeed, was truly a national poet ; the 
shrewd observer of all facts which were poetically available, the active 
and enlightened teacher of all classes of men who were susceptible 
of literary instruction. In passmg from his works to those of Lyd- 
gate, we feel as if we were turning aside from the open highway into 
the dark and echoing cloisters. The monk of Bury is thoroughly 
the monk : he is guided by the monastic spirit, and has the mo- 
nastic blindness to every thing that happens beyond the convent 
gate. He, an ecclesiastic living in the generation after Wycliffe, 
is as strongly imbued with superstitious belief and priestly preju- 
dice, as if he had just returned from the crusades, or had sat at the 
feet of Saint Dominic. If he was Chaucer's pupil in manner and 
style, his masters in opinion and sentiment were the compilers of 
the ''Gesta Romanorum." 

By marking carefully, and familiarizing to ourselves by one or 

* Warton : History of English Poetrj, 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 87 

two examples, some of the characteristics of Lydgate, the best and 
most popular of our English poets in the fifteenth century, we 
shall be prepared to hail with more lively satisfaction those great 
revolutions which, some generations afterwards, impressed a new and 
purer stamp alike on the literature and on the religion of the 
nation. 

Dan John, like his fellow-monks of earlier times, is fond of satire, 
and sometimes not unsuccessful in it. In his " London Lickpenny" 
he scourges all persons engaged in active business, particularly the 
lawyers, a class of men towards whom the clergy entertained a heavy 
grudge, for having gradually wrested from them their old monopoly 
of public emplojnnent. In other pieces he repeats, with great zest, 
the threadbare jokes on the vices and frailties of the female sex. 
Several hymns and other devotional pieces are very fine, both in 
feeling and in diction. A few stories, borrowed from the Latin col- 
lections, the French fabliaux, and unknown authorities, are used for 
inculcating precepts moral and religious, and for enforcing the 
duties of the laity to the Church. One of the apologues we shall 
use in part, by and by, as a specimen of the English written in his 
day. Some of the others are instances of the superstitious ten- 
dency lately alluded to ; while they are told with a solemn awful- 
ness of tone, which, notwithstanding the frequent intrusion of fan- 
tastic levity, gives them no small poetical merit. 

One of these recommends the duty of praying for the dead. 
Wulfric, a priest in Wiltshire, had " a great devotion " for chant- 
ing requiems. He died about midnight ; and, soon afterwards, a 
brother-priest went into the church to chant the first service of 
the day. He sees, rising from the graves in the pavement, figures 
like children, clad in white : they are departed souls for whom 
Wulfric has said mass, and who, after prayer for his repose, return 
into their sepulchres. This short story is well told by the poet. 
There is yet greater force, with a singularly striking air of ghostly 
wildness, in a much longer piece, a legend of Saint Augustin, the 
apostle of the Saxons in England. Students of foreign literature 
wiU be interested in observing that, in the seventeenth century, the 
Spanish poet Calderon founded one of his most famous dramas on a 
similar story. The poem begins with a tedious history of tithes 
from Melchisedec downwards, summed up with a warning which 
the tale is intended to make more emphatic. Visiting a village 
called Compton, Austin endeavours in vain to make the lord of the 
manor abandon a resolution he had long acted on, of refusing to pay 
tithe. The saint, on beginning to say mass m the church, sternly 
commands that every man who is not in a state of grace shall 



88 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

depart from the holy place. Suddenly a tomb is rent asunder ; and 
there issues from it a terrific figure, which crosses the churchyard 
and stands trembling at the gate. But the bold priest continues the 
ser%dce amidst universal consternation. At its close he questions 
the spectre, who tells him that he had formerly been lord of the 
manor, had refused to pay tithes, and had died excommunicated. 
Austin asks him to point out the grave of the priest who had ex- 
communicated him ; and, this being done, he summons the dead 
priest to arise and absolve the repentant sinner. The second ghost 
appears, and obeys the order ; and the first one quietly goes to his 
rest. The living lord of the manor, of course, oflfers instant pay- 
ment ; and then, abandoning all his possessions, he follows the saint 
in his mission through the land. Meanwhile, the resuscitated priest 
is disposed of, in some very impressive stanzas, after a fashion which 
the poet himself justly calls strange. Austin, by virtue of his 
miraculous powers, gives him his choice of returning to his grave, 
or of accompanying him in his preaching of the gospel. The dead 
man, after moralizing on the miseries of life, prefers to die again ; and 
the samt approves his resolution. 

3. Stephen Hawes, writing in the reign of Henry the Seventh, 
might be referred either to the fifteenth century or the next. He 
is remembered as the author of " The Pastime of Pleasm-e," a 
long allegorical poem, in the same taste as the Romance of the 
Rose. It is whimsical and tedious, but graced, in its personifica- 
tions, with much more of invention than any other English work 
near its time ; and it exhibits the language as having now assumed, 
in all essentials, the form in which it was used by the great poets of 
the Elizabethan age. The prmce G-raunde Amour, or G-reat Love, 
relates in it the history of his own life and death. Inspired, by the 
report of Fame, with affection for La Bel PuceE, (the Fair Maiden,) 
he is required to make himself worthy of her, by accepting instruc- 
tion in the Tower of Doctrine. He is there received and taught by 
the Lady Grammar, and by her sisters Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, 
and Music ; the poet kindly allowing the reader to partake fully in 
the lessons. Music introduces him to La Bel Pucell, from whom 
he is then separated, to learn yet more in the Tower of Geometry ; 
and he has afterwards to visit the Tower of Chivahy, and there to 
be made a knight. He thence goes out on adventures, worships in 
the temples of Venus and PaUas, is deceived by the dwarf False 
Report, and kills a giant who has three heads, entitled Imagina- 
tion, Falsehood, and Perjury. Afterwards he is married to his 
lady, and lives happily with her ; till he is made prisoner by Age, 
who gives him Policy and Avarice for companions. At length he 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 89 

is slain by Death, buried by Dame Mercy, and has his epitaph en- 
graved by Remembrance. 

The emblematical incidents and characters which have thus been 
sketched, recall to us the allegorical school of poetry which was so 
widely spread throughout the middle ages, and in which Chaucer 
did not disdain to study. The recollection of them, again, will be 
useful, when, in becoming acquainted with the Elizabethan master- 
pieces, we shall see the same turn of thought prevaUiug iu Spenser's 
immortal Faerie Queene. 

4. In quitting this period, we bid adieu to the Metrical Romances. 
The introduction of these into our tongue had begun, as we have 
learned, in the latter half of the thirteenth century ; and they con- 
tinued to be composed frequently tUl about the middle of the 
fifteenth. They were, to the last, almost always translations or 
imitations ; but some of the later specimens both show much im- 
provement in literary art, and embrace an increasing variety of 
topics. The chivalrous stories next began to be usually related in 
Prose. The most famous of the romances in this shape is also one of 
the best specimens of our old language, and, with hardly an excep- 
tion, the most delightful of all repositories of romantic fictions. It 
is the " Mort Arthur," in which, in the reign of Edward the 
Fourth, Sir Thomas Mallory, a priest, probably using French com- 
pilations in prose, combined into one narrative the leading adven- 
tures of the Round Table. 

As the Romances ceased to be produced, the Ballads may be said 
to have gradually taken their place. Indeed, many of these are 
just fragments of the metrical romances; and many others are 
abridgments of them. Our oldest ballad-poetry arose, perhaps, out 
of attempts to communicate to a popular audience, possessed of little 
leisure and less patience, the same kind of amusement and excite- 
ment which the recital of the romances had been designed to pro- 
duce among the nobles. 

The best of our extant ballads, both Scottish and English, belong, 
with few exceptions, to the time of Mary Queen of Scots and her 
English kinswoman and jailer. But the latter half of the fifteenth 
century appears to have been very fertile both in minstrels and 
in minstrelsy. 

All of us know the famous old chant of which Sir Philip 
Sidney said, that he could not hear it without feeling himself 
roused as if by the blast of a trumpet. " Chevy Chase seems to be 
the most ancient of those ballads that has been preserved. It may 
possibly have been written while Henry the Sixth was on the 
throne. The style is often fiery, like the old war-songs, and much 



90 THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND 

above the feeble, thougli natural and touching, manner of the later 
ballads. One of the most remarkable circumstances about this 
celebrated lay is, that it relates a totally fictitious event with all 
historical particularity, and with real names. Hence it was 
probably not composed while many remembered the days of Henry 
the Fourth, when the story is supposed to have occurred."* 

The distinguished critic whose words have just been quoted, is 
unhesitatingly of opinion that the Scottish ballads are much superior 
to the English : and it is also allowed, universally, that those which 
were produced in the border- counties of both kingdoms have much 
greater poetic merit, both through their spirited energy, and through 
the imaginative use they make of local superstitions, than such as 
had theh birth in the more southerly provinces. 

Of the latter, indeed, the only very interesting examples are those 
which celebrate the deeds of Robm Hood, and which, though the 
incidents are placed in the midland counties, are in many points 
curiously like the border-minstrelsy. The gentle and generous 
robber of Sherwood Forest is a personage probably as unreal as the 
hunting of the Percy in the wilds of Cheviot Fell. There is very 
little substance in the theory which would make him to have been 
a Saxon, manfully resisting the Norman oppressors. Yet the idea 
which this hypothesis involves is not uninstructive. Both in old 
histories, and in a curious Latin biography lately discovered, we 
are made acquainted with the adventures of a real hero, Hereward 
of Brunne in Lincolnshire. This popular chief, leading a band of 
Saxons into the marshes of Ely, thence made for years destructive 
forays on the possessions of the Normans, and at length forced 
William the Conqueror to a treaty ; perishing, however, afterwards 
by treachery or in a domestic broil. We know, too, that similar 
rebellions were not infrequent for more generations than one. 
Many exploits of the leaders were doubtless preserved traditionally 
by the conquered race, and were at hand to be woven into any 
stories that might be founded on the deeds of other champions. 
But, further, even when the national hatred for the Normans had died 
away, hatred of the nobility was kept up by the tyrannical forest- 
laws. It is as a champion of the commonalty against these, that 
Eobin Hood is distinctively presented to us : and the sense of 
wrong which they had awakened in the breasts of the peasantry 
could not be embodied more forcibly, than in the affectionate flattery 
with which the minstrels beautify his character. 

5. During this unhappy age, the spirit of metaphysical specula- 

* Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe. 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 91 

tion, and the zeal for classical learning, had alike died away. We 
might suppose erudition to have been really extinct ; were it not 
that a few Latin histories have been bequeathed to us by ecclesias- 
tics of the time, and a celebrated law-treatise by Sir John Fortescue. 
Ineffectual attempts at encouraging literature are recorded as hav- 
ing been made by a few men of rank. Shakspeare has poetized the 
tragical fate which destroyed two of these ; " the good Duke Hum- 
phrey " of Gloucester, and the accomplished Earl of Kivers, a 
writer as Avell as a patron of literary men. 

History having previously begun to be written in English, the 
return to Latin as its organ was a symptom, not less decided than 
the spirit shown in Lydgate's poetry, of retrogression towards con- 
ventual and scholastic habits. A re-adoption, yet more awkward, 
of antiquated modes of communication, was practised in the first 
half of the century by John Hardyng, who, writing a Chronicle of 
England in the English tongue, couched it wholly in verse. This 
man, too, was no ecclesiastic, but a soldier, and an active and 
dexterous political agent. Despatched, by Henry the Fifth, on a 
secret mission into Scotland, he brought back documents establish- 
ing beyond controversy, if they were genuine, the dependence of 
the Scottish crown on that of England. The fault of his most de- 
cisive articles of proof was this, that they proved a great deal too 
much : we have our choice of believing, either that he forged, or 
that he was the tool of others who did so. 

In the vernacular prose, we have hardly any thing higher than 
Fabyan's gossiping " Concordance of Histories." 

But, both in prose and in verse, some accessions were made to 
our language, through translation from the French, by a writer 
whose claim to honom- rests on surer grounds than his own literary 
compositions. 
h. ab. 1412. > A mighty revolution took place. William Caxton, a 

d. i492. j jnerchant of London, residing abroad on business, be- 
came acquainted with the recently invented art of prmting, and 
embraced it as a profession. He introduced it into England, 
probably in 1474, and practised it for nearly twenty years 
with extraordinary ardour and intelligence. The works which he 
printed were in all about sixty-four, some of them bulky, and none 
very small : an amount of activity which we should much under- 
value, if we did not recollect the great mechanical difficulties which, 
then and long afterwards, impeded the process. . All the publica- 
tions that were certainly his, except two or three, are in English, 
many of them translations ; almost all of them are of a popular 
cast, and indicate, as it has correctly been remarked, a low 



92 THE LITERATUKE OF SCOTLAND 

State of taste and information in the public for which they were 
designed. 

But Caxton's enterprise and patience unquestionably hastened 
the time when this mighty discovery became available to our 
nation : and his name deserves to stand, with honour, at the close of 
the survey we have made of English Literature during the middle 
ages. Literary works, thenceforth, were not only to be incalcula- 
bly more abundant, but to undergo, by degrees, in almost all de- 
partments, a total change of character; a change brought about 
indeed by several concurrent causes, but by none more active than 
the discarding of the manuscript and the substitution of the printed 
book. 



THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES IN SCOTLAND. 

6. While we studied the progress of literature in England from 
the Norman Conquest to the close of the thirteenth century, we 
were not tempted to turn aside by any important monuments of 
intellect in the northern quarter of the island. Scotland, divided, 
at the beginning of the period, among hostile and dissimilar races, 
was but gradually settling down into a compact kingdom, and 
offered few encouragements for the cultivation of the arts of peace. 
From the twelfth and thhteenth centuries, it is true, there might 
be collected the names of a very few scholastic theologians, whose 
works have survived, and who were of Scottish birth : but, with 
hardly an exception, these men, such as Eichard, prior of Saint 
Victor in Paris, spent their lives on the continent. This was 
also the case with Michael Scot, a native of Fifeshire, whose 
fame, as a scientific man or a wizard, was chiefly gained in Ger- 
many and Italy, at the court of the emperor Frederick the Second. 
The extant writings of Scot are universally admitted to give him 
no claim to remembrance, comparable in any degree with that 
which belongs to his contemporary Bacon. Thomas Lermont, 
again, the Khymer of Ercildoune or Earlstoun, has left us no data 
whatever for estimating the grounds of his traditional celebrity : for 
his prophecies are clumsy forgeries; and the allegation that he 
wrote the romance of Sir Tristrem is founded on mistake. 

7. The fourteenth century has bequeathed to us several noted 
names and works. 

Its only valuable monument in the Latin tongue is the " Scoti- 
chronicon " of John of Fordun, probably a canon of Aberdeen, 
which may fau4y stand comparison with the more judicious and 
trustworthy of the earlier English histories. Closing with the 



IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTUEY. 93 

death of David the First, it was brought down to that of James the 
First by Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm. 

A livelier interest belongs to two Metrical works in the living 
tongue, both of which belong to that age. 

The later of these in date was the '' Origmal Cronykil " of 
&. ab. 1350. ■) Andrew Wyntoun, prior of Saint Serf's in Lochleven, 
d. aft. 1420. J ^v-hich is a history, in nine books, partly of Scotland, 
partly of the world at large. Far from being without worth as a 
record of facts, it is totally destitute of poetical merit. 

Not so is it with a work which immediately preceded it, " The 
6. ab. 1316. \ Bruce " of John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberdeen, a 
d. 1396. j narrative poem, containing more than thirteen thousand 
rhymed octosyllabic lines. It relates the adventures of the heroic 
King Eobert, with a spirit and clearness in narrative, a dramatic 
vigour in the depicting of character, and an occasional breadth of 
reflective sentiment, which entitle this, our oldest genuine monument 
of the Teutonic language of Scotland, to be ranked as being really 
an excellent poem. If we were to compare it with the contemporary 
poetry of England, its place would be very high, Chaucer being set 
aside as unapproachable. Barbour must be pronounced much 
superior to Grower, and still more so to the anonymous writers of 
the very best of the metrical romances. 

With the romances, indeed, not with the metrical chronicles, the 
Bruce should perhaps be classed, in respect of the freedom with 
which it interweaves invented details into its web of historical 
facts. Yet the romantic licence is used with much discretion. 
The outline of the events is faithful to the truth : the hero, al- 
though he is certainly a knight- errant rather than a leader of hosts, 
does not often exert the fabulous prowess which he displays on one 
occasion, when, single-handed, he defends a pass against three hun- 
dred wild men of GaUoway ; and the only introduction of super- 
natural agency is in the account of the siege of Berwick, where 
the poet briefly describes, as a miracle, the impunity with which the 
women and children carried up arrows and stones to the Scottish de- 
fenders of the ramparts. Indeed the work is wonderfully little tinged 
with those superstitions, which we have seen emerging so often in 
the poetry of the middle ages. The poet does, it is true, attribute 
the king's early calamities, not to his slaughter of Comyn, but to 
his having committed sacrilege by slaying his enemy at the altar ; 
but his hints as to the popular sciences of astrology and necro- 
mancy indicate, at once, a characteristic cautiousness which might 
perhaps be regarded as national, and an enlightenment of opinion 
for which we should hardly have looked. The prevalent calmness 



94 THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND 

of tone and sobriety of judgment give, by contrast, additional force 
to the animated passages describing warfare and peril. Several of 
these are both boldly conceived, and executed with very great 
spirit. Such are the desperate combat in which Bruce lost the 
brooch of Lorn ; and the adventure in which he baffles the blood- 
hound of the men of the isles, with the attempted assassination 
Vv^hich is its sequel. Nor is the fierce love of warfare unrelieved 
by gentler touches, which occur both in the portraiture of charac- 
ters, in the events chosen for record, and in the sentiments ex- 
pressed by the poet. Sir Walter Scott, whose " Lord of the Isles" 
owes much to "The Bruce," and might profitably be compared 
with it, has not forgotten one of the finest of those passages ; in 
which we are told how the king, pursued by a superior force, 
ordered his band to turn and face the enemy, rather than abandon 
to them a poor woman who had been seized with illness. There 
are likewise not a few pleasing fragments of landscape-painting : 
and one of these is made unusually picturesque by having, as its 
main feature, the mysterious signal-fires that were seen blazing on 
the Scottish shore, and tempted Bruce to a dangerous landing. 

In respect of language we do not, in Wyntoun and Barbour, reach 
the point of a distinct separation between England and Scotland. If 
unessential peculiarities of spelling are disregarded, Barbour's work 
may be said to be composed in Northern English. Its style differs 
chiefly from that of Chaucer and his contemporaries, in being much 
more purely Saxon than theirs ; the writer showing, indeed, no 
symptoms of that familiarity with French poetry, which caused so 
extensive an importation of foreign words into the literary diction 
of the south. It is not, however, to be forgotten, that the arch- 
deacon seems to have had English inclinations : he travelled to 
Oxford for study after he had become a beneficed priest. 

8. In passing to the fifteenth century, we do not discover any 
traces of a dialect distinctively Scottish in the earliest poem it pre- 
sents. It is the King's Quair, (or Book,) in which the accom- 
plished King James the First celebrated the lady whom he married. 
But the royal poet was educated in England, and probably wi'ote 
there : and his pleasing poem exhibits, in its allegories and personi- 
fications, and in its whole cast of thought, the influence exerted by 
his study of those English writers of the preceding age, whom he 
himself respectfully acknowledges as his masters. 

The development of the language of Scotland into a distinct 
dialect must, even then, have fau'ly begun. It went on rapidly 
afterwards ; and it was attended by a great partiality to Chaucer 
and his contemporaries and followers, with a fondness still gi-eater 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 95 

for their French models. In no long time there arose also a taste 
for Latin reading, which influenced the style of poetry yet more 
strongly. 

None of the foreign influences is to be traced, (unless it may be 
in the use of Chaucer's heroic stanza,) in the " Wallace " of Henry 
the Minstrel, oftener called Blind Harry. This old poem was once 
much more popular in Scotland than the Bruce ; and it was likely to 
be so, on account of the more picturesque character of its incidents, 
its strain of passionate fervour, and the wildness of fancy which 
inspires some of its parts. It is altogether, notwithstanding its 
formidable bulk, a work whose origin might naturally be attributed 
to the class of men to which its author is said to have belonged ; 
the same class who, then and afterwards, were enriching the 
northern language of the island with our ancient ballads. 

Towards the close of the century, and in the beginning of the 
next, Scottish poetry, now couched in a dialect decidedly peculiar, 
was cultivated by men of higher genius than any that had yet 
appeared in Great Britain since the dawn of civilisation, the 
father of our poetical literature being alone excepted. One of 
d. ab.) them was Eobert Henryson, supposed to have been a 
1500. j monk or schoolmaster in Dunfermlme. His most ela- 
borate work was his " Testament of Faire Creseide," a con- 
tinuation, excellently versified and finely poetical, of a piece of 
Chaucer's. This Scottish poem mdeed is so exceedingly beautiful 
in many of its parts, so poetical in fancy, so rich in allegory, and 
often so touching in sentunent, that one cannot help regretting 
deeply the poet's unfortunate choice of a theme. Probably its 
unpleasant character is the reason why the work is so little known, 
even by those who are familiar with our early literature. At all 
events, Henryson is oftenest named for his beautiful pastoral of 
" Robin and Makyne," one of the gems of Percy's " Reliques." 

More vigorous both in thought and fancy, though inferior in skiU 
I. ab. 1474. \ of expression, was Gawam or Gavm Douglas, bishop of 
d. 1522. I Dunkeld, famous alike as an active politician, a man of 
learning, and a poet. His "King Hart," and " Palace of Honour," 
are complex allegories, of the kind with which we have become 
acquainted through other specimens. His Translation of the JEneid, 
into heroic verse, is a very animated poem, not more unfaithful to 
the original than it might have been expected to be; and it is 
embellished with original prologues, of which some are energeti- 
cally descriptive, and others actively critical. This was, it should 
be remembered, the earliest attempt made, in any part of our island, 
to render classical poetry into the living language of the country. 



96 THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND 

i. ab. 1465. > 9. William Dunbar, a native of Lothian, was the best 
d. ab. 1520. J British poet of his age, and almost a great one. He ap- 
pears to have been educated for the church, and to have spent some 
of his early years as a begging friar. Afterwards he became a depen- 
dant on the court of the dissolute prince who perished at Flodden. His 
poems exhibit a versatility of talent which has rarely been paralleled, 
and a moral inconsistency which it is humiliatmg to contemplate. 
In his comic and familiar pieces there prevails such a grossness, both 
of language and of sentiment, as destroys the effect of their remark- 
able force of humour : nor is ribaldry altogether wanting in those 
serious compositions, which are so admirable for their originahty and 
affluence of imagination. Allegory is Dunbar's favourite field. It 
is the groundwork of his " Golden Terge," in which the target is 
Reason, a protection against the assaults of Love ; and his ^' Thistle 
and Eose" commemorates, in a sunilar way, the king's marriage 
with an English princess. " The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins " 
is wonderfully striking, both for the boldness of the leading concep- 
tion, and for the significant picturesqueness of several of the per- 
sonifications. Unfortunately it would be almost impossible to de- 
scribe, decorously, either the design of this remarkable poem, the 
imaginative originality which colours the serious passages, or. the 
audacious flight of humorous malice with which, in the close, the 
Saxon vents the scorn he felt for his Celtic countrymen. 

^' In the poetry of Dunbar, we recognise the emanations of a 
mind adequate to splendid and varied exertion; a mind equally 
capable of soaring into the higher regions of fiction, and of descend- 
ing into the humble walk of the familiar and ludicrous. He was 
endowed with a vigorous and well-regulated imagmation ; and to it 
was superadded that conformation of the intellectual faculties which 
constitutes the quality of good sense. In his allegorical poems 
we discover originality and even sublimity of invention ; whUe those 
of a satirical kind present us with striking images of real life and 
manners. As a descriptive poet, he has received superlative praise. 
In the mechanism of poetry he evinces a wonderful degree of skiU. 
He has employed a great variety of metres ; and his versification, 
when opposed to that of his most eminent contemporaries, will 
appear highly ornamented and poetical."* 

While Scotland, nothwithstanding the troubles which marked 
almost uninterruptedly the reigns of the Jameses, was thus redeem- 
ing the poetical character of the fifteenth century from the discredit 
thrown on it by the feebleness of the art m England, her living 

* Irving : Lives of the Scottish Poets. 



IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 97 

tongue was, until very near the end of this period, used in versified 
compositions only. Scottish prose does not appear, in any literary 
shape, till the first decade of the sixteenth century : and its earliest 
specimens were nothing more than translations. 

Nor did Scottish learning take, in that age, more than its very 
first steps. The necessity of a systematic cultivation of philosophy 
and classical literature had, indeed, begun to be acknowledged. The 
university of Saint Andrews was founded in the year 1411, and that 
of Glasgow in 1450. But hardly any immediate effect was pro- 
duced except this ; that the style of most of the poets, especially 
Douglas, was deformed by a fondness for words formed from the 
Latin, which were introduced in as great numbers as French terms 
had been by Chaucer and his followers. 

The art of printing was not practised in Scotland till the very 
close of our period, when it waa introduced in Edinburgh. The 
oldest of the extant books, which is a miscellaneous volume, chiefly 
filled with ballads and metrical romances, bears the date of 1508. 



PAKT SECOND. 



THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH 
LANGUAGE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON PEEIOD. 
A. D. 449— A. D. 1066. 

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF THE 
LANGUAGE. 

1. The Families of European Tongues — The Celtic, Gothic, and Classical — 
The Anglo-Saxon a Germanic Tongue of the Gothic Stock. — 2. Founders 
of the Anglo-Saxon Eace in England — Jutes, Saxons, Angles — The Old 
Frisic Dialect. — 3. History of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue — Prevalence of 
the Dialect of the West Saxons — Two Leading Dialects — The Saxon — 
The Anglian or Northumbrian. — 4. What Dialect of Anglo-Saxon passed 
into the Standard English Tongue? — 5. Close Eesemhlance of the Anglo- 
Saxon Tongue to the English — Illustrated by Examples. — 6. 7. Alfred's 
Tale of Orpheus and Eurydice— Literal Translation and Notes. — 8, Caed- 
mon's Destruction of Pharaoh — Translated with Notes. 



[It is hoped that this slight sketch has been so framed as to be available, 
not only for private study, but also for use in teaching ; although, by reason 
of the nature of the matter, lessons cannot be given from it with the same 
smoothness and ease as from the Literary Chapters. It may be used in 
any of several ways. 

On the one hand, an attempt has been made, through the Translations and 
Notes appended to the Extracts, to include within the fom- corners of the 
book every explanation that could absolutely be required, although the stu- 
dent were not to have the aid of an instructor. The Text, on the other 
hand, if read without the Extracts and their apparatus, furnishes a plain 
summary, from which all the leading facts and doctrines may be learned, in 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 99 

cases where it seems imad\-isable to undertake a closer scrutiny. Indeed a 
great deal of knowledge might be gained from the Fourth Chapter alcne, 
the study of which cannot be ditEcult for any one. 

Or, again, these Cliapters may fui-nish three successive courses of study, 
progressively increasing in difficulty. The first would embrace the Fourth 
Chapter, in which the results of the historical survey are summed up. The 
second would carry the student through the Text of the First, Second, and 
Third Chapters, the Extracts being passed over. In the third course, the 
Extracts would be studied carefally, with such re-perusal of the Text as 
might be found convenient. 

All that is here given, however, barely deserves to be called so much as 
an Introduction to the Study of the English Tongue. Nothing more is aimed 
at than pointing out a niethod of investigation, and showing that the. method 
is not only easy, but productive of interesting and valuable conclusions. 

Exact and systematic acquaintance with the history and structure of our 
noble language must be gained in riper studies, guided by manuals more 
learned and copious. The mquuy has been prosecuted with great acuteness 
and ingenuity in Dr Latham's " English Language " and Grammars; and, to 
say nothing of other meritorious works, the chief results of recent philolo- 
gical speculations are perspicuously summed up and ably commented on in 
Professor Craik's "Outlines of the History of the English Language." 

From these books it Avill appear, how incalculably important the Anglo- 
Saxon Tongue is, both to our vocabulary and to our grammar. We may 
see the same thing at a glance, by opening the English, Scottish, and Anglo- 
Saxon Dictionaries of Eichardson, Jamieson, and Bosworth. It is a fact 
not to be concealed, that every one who would learn to understand English 
as thoroughly as an accomplished scholar ought to understand it, must be 
content to begin by mastering Eask's excellent " Anglo-Saxon Grammar," 
(in Thorpe's translation,) or at least the useful epitome given in Bosworth 's 
■•Essentials." For practice in reading this, our mother-tongue, full and 
well-explained specimens are now accessible, especially in ilr Thorpe's 
" Analecta," and other Avorks of the same distinguished philologer; as 
well as in the publications of Mv Kemble, and other eminent Anglo-Saxon 
scholars. Mr. Guest's " History of English Ehythms " should be consulted 
particularly. 

To the books now named, with some others, these chapters are indebted for 
all their principal facts and opinions ; and they communicate, it is believed, 
as much of the fruits of our improved philology as the limits and purpose 
of the volume would allow. In the few instances where the teachers are 
dissented from, or their reasonings pressed a step or two beyond their own 
inferences, the deviation is not made without the hesitating deference justly 
due to critics, who have, for the first time, laid down a firm foundation for 
English Grammar to stand on.] 



1. The pedigree of the Englisli language is very clear. It is, as 
we have seen, directly descended from tlie Anglo-Saxon, but derives 
much from the Norman-French, and much also from the Latin. 
We must now learn more exactly the position which these thi-ee 
hold among the European tongues. 



LcfC, 



100 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

The Languages spoken in modern Europe are usually distributed 
into four or five groups. All the tongues that have ever been 
used by nations inhabiting our islands, are comprehended in three 
of these. The first of the three, the Celtic, was introduced before 
either of the others, in both of its branches, the Cymric and the 
Gaelic, and continues to be the speech of considerable sections of 
our people : but it has not exercised on the language of the mass of 
the nation any appreciable influence. The tongues with which we 
are at present concerned are embraced in two other European 
groups ; the Gothic, and the Classical or Grseco-Roman. 

The Gothic Languages of the continent are distributable into 
two stocks or main branches, the Germanic or Teutonic, and the 
Scandinavian. Those of the former branch presenting two distinct 
types, all the Gothic Languages may be said to fall into three 
great families ; and these are distinguished from each other by 
well-marked characteristics. The Fu-st family comprehends those 
tongues which were used by the tribes occupying the hilly regions 
of Southern Germany, and which thence have been called High- 
German. It is one of these that has been developed into the 
standard German : but our mother-tongue was not among them. 
The Second family was the Scandinavian, the farthest north of the 
three. Its principal member still exists with little change in the 
Icelandic, out of which have groM^n up the modem Swedish and 
Danish. The Norwegians and Danes, by whom our blood and 
speech have been to a small degree affected, were Scandinavians. 
Thirdly, the name of Low-German has been given to the Gothic 
languages which were spoken in the plains of Northern Germany, 
and of which, in modern times, the leading example is the Dutch. 
The Anglo-Saxon, in all its varieties, was essentially a Low-Ger- 
man tongue. As being such, it is more nearly allied to the High- 
German than it is to the Scandinavian. 

The Classical group of European Tongues embraced, in ancient 
times, the Greek and the Latin. From the latter of these have 
flowed three modern languages : the Italian ; the Spanish, with its 
variety the Portuguese ; and the French, which, as we learned in 
our literary survey, was long broken up provincially into two dia- 
lects. The French elements of our speech come from the dialect 
of Northern France, which has since passed into the standard 
French language. 

2. According to the old traditions reported by our historians, 
the settlers who founded the Anglo-Saxon race in England belonged 
to three Gothic tribes, whose continental seats had lain along the 
North Sea and on the southeni shores of the Baltic. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 101 

The Jutes or South Jutlanders were the first invaders, but by far 
the least numerous. They are said to have hardly occupied more 
than the county of Kent, and v/ere speedily lost among the more 
powerful colonies that followed. Accordingly, their history is in 
every view unimportant. 

Next came, in succession, several large bodies of Saxons. They 
gradually filled the southern districts of England, between Corn- 
wall or Devonshire on the south, Kent on the east, and the course 
of the rivers Thames and Severn to the north and north-west ; pass- 
ing northward also, in their latest migrations, considerably beyond 
the valley of the Thames. Both the lineage of our Saxons, and 
their place on the continent, have always been matters of dispute : 
indeed the name was given, in the Dark Ages, to several tribes, who 
spread themselves widely through Germany, and would seem to 
have been, in part at least, united by confederacy only, not closely 
by blood. The utmost assertion we can safely make is this ; that 
our Saxon immigrants must have come from some part of the sea- 
coast between the mouth of the Eyder and that of the Rhine. 

The third tribe of invaders were the Angles or Engie, who are 
described as having beea very numerous, and who, in the end, gave 
their name to the whole country. The territory which they seized 
extended northward from the north border of the Saxons to the Frith 
of Forth ; and it embraced within that range all the provinces, both 
English and Scottish, to the east of those which were still for a 
time held by the Cymric Celts. They are usually said to have 
emigrated from the small district of Angien, which lies in the west 
of the modern duchy of Schleswig. 

Some recent antiquaries have endeavoured to throw discredit on 
all the particulars of this ancient story. It does bear one diffi- 
culty on the face of it. So narrow a tract as Angien cannot well 
have furnished the large body of emigrants which it is said to have 
poured into England ; hardly even if it was left unpeopled, as Bede 
asserts it to have been for generations afterwards. But, although the 
doubts thus raised were to be confirmed, our real knowledge of our 
ancestors would remain as it was, neither diminished nor increased. 

The truth is, that very little light is thrown on the origin or 
character of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, by the venerable history 
which is perpetuated in its name. When we search for points of 
comparison among the old Gothic tongues of the continent, we find 
none such that is attributed to any nation called Angles. As to 
those> again, that were spoken by the continental Saxons la their 
extensive wanderings, none has been preserved that comes very 
close to our insular mother-tongue ; excepting only that which our 



102 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

antiquaries at present call the old Saxon : and of it the surviving 
monuments are neither numerous nor ancient enough to afford a 
solid foundation for comparison. 

The most instructive fact which has*been discovered is this. Of 
all the old Grothic tongues that are tolerably well known, that which 
the Anglo-Saxon resembles most nearly is the Old Frisic, a Low- 
German dialect, which was once spoken extensively between the 
Rhine and the Elbe, and is the parent of the Modern Dutch. The 
Frisic, then, or a Low-German dialect very like it, must have been 
in use among the mass of our Teutonic invaders, by whatever names 
they may have called themselves, or been known by the imper- 
fectly informed historians who lived soon after they crossed into 
om- island. 

3. Before the battle of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon tongue had 
been spoken in England for at least six hundred years. During 
that period, it cannot but have undergone many changes. Further, 
those who imported it belonged, almost certainly, to different Low- 
German tribes ; and their descendants, who inhabited our island, 
were long divided into several hostile nations. Therefore there must 
have been dialectic varieties in the several regions of then- British 
territory. 

The history, both of our language and of its founders, would be 
pertinently illustrated by any information that could be gained, 
regarding either those successive changes, or those contempo- 
raneous local varieties. But of the former we know nothing what- 
ever, and of the latter not very much. The evidence as to both 
was destroyed by cu'cumstances emerging in the course of the na- 
tional progress. 

The long conflict between the several states usually known as 
the Heptarchy, was brought to a close, early in the nmth century, 
by the subjection of all of them to the kings of Wessex, or the Land 
of the West Saxons, whose hereditary realm may be said to have 
had its centre in Berkshire and Hants. Accordingly, the speech of 
the Saxons or Southern Anglo-Teutons, with any peculiarities it 
may have had in Wessex, came to be the ruling language, both of 
government, and of such literature as was to be found. The use of 
it, as the instrument of literary communication, was extended and 
permanently confirmed by the example and influence of Alfred, him- 
self a native of Berks. 

Now, our Anglo-Saxon remains, with very few exceptions, are 
of the age of Alfred, or less ancient ; and such as are more recent 
than his time, were naturally, in most cases, composed in the dia- 
lect which he had made classical. Nor is this all. Our scanty 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 103 

remains of an older time, even when they must have been first 
written in other dialects, (as in the case of Csedmon, who was a 
North Anglian,) have reached us only in manuscripts of more re- 
cent date ; and in these the copyists have probably modernized 
not a little, and have certainly left few traces of local peculiarities 
deviating from those of Wessex. Indeed, when we consider that 
our oldest manuscripts are not nearly so old as the time of Alfred, 
we can hardly believe that we possess even the works of his time, 
free from all alterations intended to accommodate them to more 
modern fashions of speech. 

In spite of these impediments, however, we do possess some evi- 
dence of dialectic differences. It is gathered, in the first instance, 
from a few ecclesiastical manuscripts written in the Anglian king- 
dom of Nortliumbria, which extended from the Humber to the 
Scottish Friths ; and its results are confirmed by a comparison with 
relics of the middle ages exhibiting dialectic varieties, and by an 
examination of the modern dialects spoken in the North of Eng- 
land. Inferences may be founded also on the names of places; 
although, for several reasons, these must be used with great caution.* 

We are thus entitled to assert that all the local varieties of the 
Anglo-Saxon were referable to the one or the other of two leading 
Dialects, a Northern and a Southern. The Anglian or Northum- 
brian dialect, while possessing the Low-German character in all 
essentials, was unlike the Southern or Saxon in several mmor fea- 
tures, some of which, though not many, were distinctively Scandi- 
navian. 

Whence these Scandinavian features were derived, is a disputed 
question among our philologers. Some have attributed them 
wholly to the many settlements which, in the later Anglo-Saxon 
times, the Danes effected in the north-east of England. One of 
the proofs by which this theory is supported is furnished by the 
names of places. Many of these, stUl preserved, indicate unequivo- 
cally the presence of the Danes in the North-Eastern counties of 
England as far southward as the Wash of Lincoln, and thence a 
short way to the south-west ; whUe names of the same origin stretch 
westward into Westmoreland and Cumberland, districts, however, 
in which the British Celts long kept their ground. It is also a 
curious fact, that the Scandinavian features are more decided in 
the more recent Anglian manuscripts than in those that are older.f 
\ 

* One very interesting Northumlbrian monument, which has now been 
fully deciphered, is the inscription engraved on an ancient cross, which 
stands, at this day, in the manse-garden at Ruthwell in Dumfries-shire. 

t Garnett : in the Transactions of the Philological Society : Vol. II. 1846,; 



104 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Other scholars find, in the Scandinavian features, a confirmation 
of the tradition which brought the Angles from a land bordering 
closely on Scandinavia. If this was their old abode, their Low- 
G-erman tongue may naturally have been tinctured by some Norse 
peculiarities.* It is admitted, indeed, that the territorial boun- 
daries of the two leading dialects cannot be exactly identified with 
those which the current history assigns as having separated the 
Angles and the Saxons. The Northern dialect has not been traced 
satisfactorily over the whole of the Anglian ground. But it is 
maintained that this fact has been caused by those political changes, 
which speedily separated the most southerly sections of the Angles 
from their Northumbrian brethren, and subjected them in aU respects 
to Saxon influence; that, notwithstanding, Anglian elements are 
still traceable in dialects spoken as far south as the Thames ; and 
that these can be shown to have prevailed yet more extensively 
in the same provinces during the middle ages. 

It may be worth while to remark, that the two theories are not 
properly contradictory of each other. The dialect of the Angles 
may have been in some points Scandinavian ; and the Danes may 
afterwards have ingrafted on it other peculiarities of the same sort. 

4. Leaving this question, however, as undecided, we ought to 
remember, also, that, although the two dialects only are traceable 
in our relics of the Anglo-Saxon period, dialectic varieties much 
more numerous showed themselves in no long time after the Norman 
conquest. A writer of the fourteenth century asserts peremptorily, 
that there were then spoken in England three dialects, a Southern, 
a Midland, and a Northern. Some such division had probably 
arisen much earlier ; and several of our philologers insist on distri- 
buting our mediaeval dialects into a still larger number of groups. 

The consideration of dialect, indeed, presents a mine of curious 
inquiry, which might be worked along the whole history of our 
language. But the vein has been little more than opened by our 
philological antiquaries : and the interesting speculations they have 
proposed are still too fragmentary, as weU as too special, to be 
useful to us in these elementary studies. 

We may put to ourselves, however, before passing onward to 
observe the decay of our mother-tongue, one question which some 
of our scholars have endeavoured to answer. Which of the dialects 
of the Anglo-Saxon is specifically the parent of the English Lan- 
guage ? 

* Rask, himself a Dane, is of opinion, not only that his countrymen did not 
corrupt our tongue, but that we corrupted theirs. The Danish departs 
further from its Icelandic root than the Swedish does ; and the critic dates 
the deviation from the establishment of Canute's throne in England. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 105 

It is not necessarily the classical Saxon of Wessex. The cir- 
cumstances of the centuries next after the Norman Conquest were 
such as would make this unlikely rather than otherwise. That 
dialect had quite lost its political and social supremacy. It still 
possessed, no doubt, the influence due to it as the organ of the older 
literary monuments ; but these, there is much reason to suppose, 
were little studied by most of those who guided the corruption of 
the ancient tongue, or its transformation into the new. When any 
thing like literary composition was attempted, in the early Norman 
times, by natives using their own language, each writer seemingly 
'aimed at nothmg more than expressing his meaning, as he best 
could, through the words and idioms that were familiar in his 
neighbourhood. 

Besides this, in the transition-stage of the language, we are tempted 
to look, both for original writers and for copyists of manuscripts, 
chiefly to those Midland counties which had lain Avithin the Saxon 
kingdom of Mercia, counties whose Teutonic colonists had been 
Angles, but which had for centuries been subjected to the govern- 
ment and mfluence of the Saxons of Wessex. These counties be- 
came soon the seats of the universities; they abounded in rich 
m-onasteries and other religious foundations; and, when we reach a 
time in which the new language was freely used in literature, we 
find a large proportion of its eiforts to have issued from that 
quarter. There, accordingly, the English tongue is by some critics 
alleged to have had its birth. 

In support of this theory, it has been argued, that, if Wessex 
gave the law to our language, the provincial speech of Berkshire 
and the neighbouring districts, which is admittedly liker to the 
written Anglo-Saxon than any other of our m.odern dialects is, ought 
also to be that which deviates least from the standard English. 
But it is alleged by competent scholars that this is not its character. 
The provincial dialect which is most nearly pure is said, though 
the details still requu'e exammation, to be now spoken in Northamp- 
tonshire, or in some of the counties innmediately surrounding it.* 

On the other hand, it has been maintained, by a very eminent 
antiquary and philologer, (and the conclusion seems to be highly 
probable,) that we must be content to seek for the groundwork of 

* Guest's English Rhythms : Latham's English Language. " Before Lay- 
amon's ' Brut ' was written, a language agreeing much more closely with 
our standard speech, in words, in idioms, and in grammatical forms, existed 
in the Eastern Midland district. This form, which we may for the sake of 
distinction call Anglo-Mercian, was adopted by influential writers and by the 
cultivated classes of the metropolis ; becoming, by gradual modifications, 
the language of Spenser and Shakspeare." Quarterly Eeview: Vol. LXXXII. 

e2 



106 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

our language in a gi-adual coalescence of the leading dialects of all 
the provinces of England except those that lay furthest north.* 
The question, how the coalescence was brought about, opens a 
very interesting track of speculation. 

5. The broad doctrme, that the English Language is the direct 
offspring of the Anglo-Saxon, cannot be too strongly unpressed on 
our minds. That the fact is so, will be plain to every one who 
examines a few sentences from our ancient relics, with such previous 
knowledge, or such accompanying aid, as enables him to compre- 
hend their meaning. We will translate an easy passage, before 
beginning to watch the process by which the one tongue was gra- 
dually transformed into the other. 

The resemblance between the Vocabularies of the two is very 
strikmgly sIiotnii m this passage. It contains four or five words, 
which our standard speech in m.odern times does not possess in 
any shape, but all of which occur in provincial dialects, and in 
books not older than Chaucer. It contains about as many others, 
which perhaps disappeared altogether by the fourteenth century. 
With these exceptions, aU its words bear so near a Hkeness to 
some with Avhich we are familiar, that the idea conveyed by each 
of them might be conjectured by a good Enghsh' scholar, with little 
risk of serious error. 

As to the Grammatical peculiarities, again, the verbs that occur 
are so like our own, (except in having the infinitive in -an, and 
plural forms different from the singular,) that the interlined tran- 
slation is required rather on account of the uncouth spelling, than 
for any other reason. The student has to remember, however, 
that the substantives are declined by termination like the, Latin, 
having all the cases except the vocative and ablative, and that the 
termination usually fixes the gender ; and he must be warned, also, 
that the adjectives, pronouns, and articles, are similarly declined. 

Our Extract is taken from Alfred's loose translation of Boethius 
" On the Consolation of Philosophy." It is a passage in v/hich he 
has allowed himself very great scope ; substituting, mdeed, for one 
of the metrical pieces of the original, a prose story of his ovm. He 
gives us the classical fable, the lying tale, as he calls it, of Orpheus 
and Eurydice.f 



* "It seems unquestionable, that the dialects of the Western, Southern, 
and IMidland Counties, contributed together to form the language of the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and consequently to lay the foundation of 
Modern English." Sir Frederick Madden 's Edition of Layamon's Brut ; 1847. 

t Thorpe's " Analecta Saxonica" (Avith Glossary), 1834: Text and Trans- 
lation compared with Cardale's " Anglo-Saxon Boethius," 1829. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 107 

6. We^ sciilon- get,^ of ealdum^ leasiim° spelliim,^ tlie'^ 
We will note, from old lying tales, to-tliee 

sum^ bispeir^ reccan.^^ Hit-'^-'- gelamp^^ gio,'^^ thsette an^^ 
a-certain parable tell. It hapjjened formerly, that a 

hearpere wjes, on tliaere^^ theode^*' the^'' Tliracia liatte.^^ 
harper icas, in the nation which Thrace icas-called. 

Thses^^ nama wses Orfeiis. He lisefde^*^ an sT\-itlie--'^ eenlic-"^ 

His name was Orpheus. He had a very incoraparable 
^f^^. Sid wses haten-'^ Eurydice. Tha-^ ongann^^ 

wife. She icas called Eurydice. Then began 

I The First Personal Pronoun : retained in English : sing. nom. ic ; gen. 
7ni7i ; dat. ace. 7ne ; plur. nom. zee (dual, icit) ; gen. icre (dual, unser, Ger- 
man) ; dat. us, ur, or xms ; ace. xis, ur (dual, iins). Here, and elsewhere, the 
long vowels are marked with an accent ('), in instances where oiu- modern 
rules of pronunciation might incline us to suppose them short. 

^ Scealan, to owe (the English shall, hut diflferently used) ; imperf. ic 
sceolde, I should. s English, yet. 

* Dat. plur. of adj. eald, whence English eld, elder. 

5 Leas, false ; whence old English leasing. Also, in composition, void : 
whence the English affix -less. 

6 Dat. pi. oi sj)ell, neut. tale, history. In composition, lisj)eTl, by-tale, ex- 
ample (German, heisirieT) ; godsjjell, good-history, gospel. 

'' Second Personal Pronoun (with a dual which has long heen lost) ; sing, 
nom. thu ; gen. tMn ; dat, ace. the ; plur. nom. ge; gen. eoicer- dat. ace. eoic. 

s English, some. ^ See Kote 6. 

10 To reckon ; meaning also, when conjugated diflferently, to reck or care 
for. 

II Third Personal Pronoun ; Sing. IVlasc. nom. lie (sometimes se) ; gen. Ms; 
dat. lam: ace. iiine ; Fern. nom. lieo, seo, sio ; gen. dat. liire, lujre ; ace. M; 
Neut. nom. hit; gen. his (as in the English Bible) ; dat. him; ace. hit. Plural 
in all genders nom. hi, (sometimes hig, heo] ; gen. hira, heora; dat. him, hcom ; 
ace. hi, hig. 

12 From gelimpan, now lost. 13 A word now lost. 

1* A'n or cen, originally the numeral one. 

■ 15 Dat. of Definite Article, which coincides in parts with the third personal 
pronoun masculine, and with the demonstrative pronoun tha^t. Sing. Masc. 
nom.se; gen. thces ; A&t. thum ; s.cc. thone; Fem. nom. seo; gen. dat. thoire; 
ace. thct ; Neut. nom. flicet ; gen. thces ; dat. thdm ; ace. thait. Plural in all 
genders, nom. ace. thu. ; gen. thdra, thara ; dat. thdm. 

16 Dat. of theod (lost), a people or comatry. 

1'' Relative Pronoun undeclined ; substituted in later Anglo-Saxon for the 
definite article masculine se : and thus producing our definite article. A de- 
clined relative pronoim is hicilc or Inci/lc (old Scottish, v:hiUS)^ compounded 
of hwd-lic, what-Iike, It passed gradually into the English tchich. 

18 Hdtan, to have for a name ; whence old English hight, named, or is 
named. 

1^ Gen. of definite article, used as third personal pronoun. 

20 JJabban, to have ; he hcefth, he hath. 

21 Swithe, sidthor, sicithost, much, more, most ; adv. from swith, strong. 

22 One-like, unique, smgular. 

23 Wif, wife, woman ; neuter by termination. 

24 See Note 18. 25 Then, when, as. 

26 Inf. onginnan; pret. ongan ; partic. ongunnen. The root is retained in 
our word begin (from heginnan). 



108 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

monn^^ secgan^^ be^^ tham hearpere, thset^^ he mihte^^ hearpian 
people to-say regarding the harper, that he could harp 
thset se wudu wagode^^ for th^m swege,^^ and wilde deor^^ 
that the wood moved for the sound, and wild beasts 
thser woldon^s to-irnan^^ and standan^'^ swilce^^ hi t^me^^ 
there would to-run and stand as-if they tame 
wseron, swa stille, the^h hi menn^^ oththe'*^ hundes*^ with*^ 
were, so still, though them men or hounds against 

eddon,'^^ thset hi hi na ne*'^ onscunedon.^'' Tha ssedon'^'' 
v)ent, that they them not not shunned. Then said 

hi thset thses hearperes*^ wif sceolde*'^ acwelan,^*^ and hire 
t-hey that the harper''s wife should die, and her 

sawle°^ mon^2 sceolde Isedan^^ to helle.^^ 
soul one should lead to Hades. 

27 Man or mon; the same as the French on ; English, one (as, " one would 
think") ; German, man. In Anglo-Saxon, man, or rather mann, signifies 
also a man; gen. mannes ; plur. nom. menn (regularly mannas) / gen. manna; 
dat. mannum. 

28 Infinitive : having in the pret. sing, scegde, soide ; pi. scedon. 

29 Be, hi, preposition with dat. : signifying by, beside, of, for. 
^ Irregular spelling ; see another spelling of the word above. 

31 Or meahte, might ; from magan (whence may) to be able. 

32 Pret. from wagian, to wag. 

^ Hence Old English swough (Chaucer) ; Scottish, sough. 

^ Hardly ever meaning deer, except in composition; German, thier. 
" Eats and mice, and such small deer." — Shakspeare. 

^ Willan, wyllan, to will ; ic wille, I will ; tliu wilt, thou wilt. Pret. Ic 
wold or wolde ; tliu woldest ; lie wold or wolde ; we, ge, hi, woldon. 

36 Example of a compound form, greatly more common in Anglo-Saxon 
than in modem English ; from yrnan or irnan, otherwise rennan (German, 
rennen), to run. 

3' Inf. standan ; pres. ic stande, tfiu stenst or standest, he steiit or stynt ; 
pret. ic stod, we stodon ; partic. gestanden. 

38 Adv. from swilc or swylc (from swd, so ; and ylc, samel, such. 

39 PL from turn, tame. *« See Note 27. 

^1 Either, or ; whence the English other and (by contraction) or. 

^2 Sing. nom. ace. hund; gen. hundes ; dat. hunde; plur. nom. ace. hundas; 
gen. hunda ; dat. hundum. The -es in the plur. nom. and ace. (which con- 
founds those cases with the sing, gen.) is an irregular form, which became 
more and more frequent as the language decayed, and was one of the steps 
towards the English. 

*3 Against or towards, retained in English, but with a meaning not usual 
in Anglo-Saxon: the Anglo-Saxon preposition signifying with is mid. 

■^ Inf. gdn or gangan ; pres. ic go. or gauge, he gceth ; pret. ic eude, we eu- 
don; partic. gdn, agcen, agdn, gangen (Scottish, gang, gae, gaen). 

■^ Kepetition of negatives ; very common in Anglo-Saxon. 

^ Inf. onscunian, from scunian ; whence the English shtm. 

^■^ See Note 28. ^ Gen. of hearjiere, used above. 

^^ See Note 2. Here, as often in Anglo-Saxon and Old English, scealan 
is used, like the German sollen, to indicate a reported or indirect recital. 

^ Verb neut. from the act. cwellan or acwellan, to kill (quell). 

•^1 Scottish. 52 See Note 27. 

^ Inf. loidan or gela^dan ; pret. ic Icedde, gelcedde ; part, gelceded, gelwd, 
Iccded, Iced. 

^ l)at. of hell ; from Hela, the goddess of death in the Norse mythology. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. 109 



7. Tha tham hearpere th^ thuhte,^^ thset hine nanes-'''' 
When to-the harper then it-seemed, that him of -no 
thingeS^^ ne lyste^^ on thisse^^ worulde, tha tlidhte^*^ he 
thing not it-listed in this world, then thought he 

thaet he wolde gangan, and biddan^^ thset hi him ageafon^^ 
that he would go, and heg that they to-him give 

eft63 his wif. * * * Tha he 

back his wife. When he 

tha lange and lange hearpode, tha clypode^* se cyning,^^ and 
tJien long and long harped, then called the king, and 
cwaeth : ^^ " Uton^^ agifan tham esne*"^ his wif, forth^m^^ he 
mid: " ... give to-the fellow his wife, because he 

hi hsefth geearnod:'^ and ssede : gif'^-' he hine underbsec"^^ 
her haih earned : and said : if he ... ^ backward 
besawe,'^^ thset he sceolde forlsetan'* thset wif. Ac*"^ lufe mon 
looked, that he should lose the woman. But love one 

^5 Inf. tliincan ; "gxQt. tliulite ; partic. gethuht; an impersonal verb, signi- 
fying, it seems (whence the English metMiiks). 56 Q-en. oi nan. 

57 G-en. of thing ; an example of the origin of our English possessive in 's. 

^ Inf. lystan ; pret. lyste ; to desire, be pleased with. Generally used im- 
personally, as here. English, list, lust. 

59 Nom. masc. thes ; fern, tlieos; neut. tMs, tliys ; plur. nom. in all genders, 
thus. Oblique cases very various. 

60 Inf. thencun (also hetJtencan, gethencan), to think; pret. tMTite ; partic. 
getMht. Compare Note 55. 

61 Inf. hiddan ; pret. Jcec? ; partic. oeden ; to beg, to bid ; hence English 
headsman. 

62 Or geafon; subj. pret. plur. from inf. gifan (or agifan) ; pret. ic geaf, 
gcsf, gaf; vje geaf on ; partic. gifen. 63 Back, again, after. 

6* Pret. from inf. chjpian or deopian; partic. geclyjpod ; to call, to cry; 
whence Old English yclept, iclejit, named. 

65 Otherwise ^vritten cynig, cyneg, and cyng. 

66 Inf. cioetJian ; pret. ciccefh ; whence old English quoth. 

67 Said to be used for giving an imperative power to the infinitive of the 
verb. An adverb, meanmg without or beyond, from the adverb ut, out. 

68 A serf. See the manumission of Gui'th in Ivanhoe. 

69 For-that; an example of a common kind of Anglo-Saxon adverbs, of 
which we retain some ; as, nohwcer, thceron, thcerin ; while we have formed 
many others on the same principle. 

70 Inf. earnian (or geearnian) ; part, geearnod. When ge- is a prefixed aug- 
ment of derivative parts of the verb (as it still is usually in German parti- 
ciples) it has often been retained by the Old English in the softened form of 
y- or i-. 

71 Originally the imperative o^ gifan, to give. 

72 The preposition under, and hcec, a loack ; behind backs, 

73 Inf. beseon (from se6n, to see) ; pret. ic beseuh, thu besaice, he hesawe or 
hesedh ; hine beseon, to look (literally, to.be-see himself, as in the phrase " to 
bethink himself.") 

7^* Commonly, to permit, or forsake ; from /or (prep.) and Icetan, to let. 
75 Lost in this shape and meaning ; but supposed really the same with cec, 
dc, or 6c (also), which Avas originally the imperative of ecan, to eke or add. 



110 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

mseg''^ swithe uneatlie^^ forbeddan'^^ • Wei la wei ! '^ Hwaetl * 
may very difficultly forbid: Alas! What! 

* * Tim lie forth on tliset leolit com,80 ^^^ 

When he forth into the light came^ then 
bese^h^^ he hine underbsec, with^^ thses wifes : tha losede^^ 
looked he ... haclcward^ towards the woman : then, was-lost 
hed him sona.^* Thas^^ spell Iserath^^ gehwylcne^'^ man, 

she to-him straightway. This story teacheth every man, 
thset he hine ne besid^^ to his ealdum^^ yfelum,^^ swa'-*-^ thset he 
that he ... not look to his old vices, so that he 
hi fullfremme/'^^ swa he hi ser^^ dyde.^* 
them practise, as he them before did. 

8. We must not quit our Pure Mother-Tongue without glancing 
at a specimen of that very singular Poetry, of which she has trans- 
mitted to us so many efforts. Its characteristics, both in diction 
and in versification, have already been briefly explained. 

They may be sufficiently illustrated by the few following verses, 
taken from a passage of Csedmon, which relates the destruction of 
Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea. That the nature of the metre may 
be easily perceptible, each half- couplet is marked off in the original 
by a colon.* 

76 See Note 31. 

'7 Adv. from uneatk (literally, un-easy) ; from un privative (German, ohm, 
without), and eatli, easy. 

78 From /or (here negative, as the German ver) and heudan, to bid or com- 
mand ; pret. head, hude, hod; partic. hoden. 

79 Etymology and spelling doubtful ; Old English, well-away ! 

80 Inf. cuman ; pres. ic cume, he cymth ; pret. com ; partic. cumen. 

81 See Note 73. 82 *^ee Note 43. 

83 Losian, to lose ; also, as here, to be lost, or to perish. 

84 English, soon. The Anglo-Saxon, swim, means son. The Anglo-Saxon 
Sunne, sun : it is feminine because of Norse mythology ; as mona, moon, 
is, for the same reason, masculine. 

85 Used for this ; See Note 59. 

8S Inf. Iceran; substantive Icere, lore (Scottish, lair, tear). 
87 Accusative, in the indefinite form, of gehwylc, every, whatever ; from 
hwylc, what, which. 
t8 Subjunctive. See Note 73. 89 See Note 4. 

so Dat. plur. oiyfel, evil. 9i Swd-swa, so-as. 

92 FuVfremman, to fulfil ; iroxafvll, full, diUA fremman, to frame. 

93 Adv. earlier, ere ; superlative, cerst, soonest, erst, first. 

94 Infin. dun, to do ; pres. ic do ; tliu dest, he dttk or doth, we doth ; pret. 
ic dijde, thu dydest, he dyde or did, we dydon ; partic. gedon ; imperat. do thu. 

* Thorpe's " Caedmon's Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scri])- 
tures, with an English Translation, Notes, and a Verbal Index," 1832. Cony- 
beare's " Illustrations of Anglo Saxon Poetry," 1826. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ELEMENTS. Ill 

Folc wses afsered -A Fldd-egsa^ becwdm : ^ 
( The) folk was afraid : food fear came-in : 

Gastas* geomre^ : Geafon deathe-hweop : ^ 

Ghosts murmuring gave (the) death-iohoop : 

Woldon here'' bleathe : Hamas^ finden : 

Would {the) host hlithely homes find. 

A^c behindan beleac : ^ Wyrd^^ mid v/sege : 

But behind locked (them) : Fate 'with {the) wave. 

Streamas stddon : Storm up-gew^t : ^^ 

Streams stood^ : Storm up-ioent : 

Weollon^^ wsel-benna : 13 Wite-rdd^"* gefeol:^^ 

Rolled corpses {of) men : {the) punishment-rod fell 

Heah of heofoiium i^*^ Hand-weorc Godes-i*" 

high from heavens^ hand-worh of God. 

1 Afeard^ Old English. 

2 Egsa is a rare word, and here obscurely used. 

3 From hecuman (whence English become)., to enter, to happen. 
* Nom. sing, gast; Scottish, gliaist. 

5 German, jammer ; Scottish, yammer. 

6 A fresh mstance of the true Saxon form of our modern wJi-. 

' Heer., German. ^ Nom. sing. Tidm ; gen. Jidmes ; Scottish, hame. 

9 Inf. ielucan; partic. helocen. 

^^ Old English and Scottish, loeird; " The weird sisters." — Macbeth. 

11 Inf. gewitan, to depart, 

12 Pret. of weallan, to spring or boil up ; iveall., wyll., or well., a well. 

13 Wcel (German, wahlstatt, a battle-field), s]aughter ; thence a dead body. 
Bemi, a man (rare). 

1* Substantives were compounded together in Anglo-Saxon, as freely as in 
modem German. The wite (Scottish for blame) was the fine paid to the com- 
ttiunity by a murderer. 

1^ Inf. feallan ; pret. /eoZZ, gefeol ; partic. gefeallen. 

16 Dat. plur. of heofon ; derived from Tieafen., partic. of Jiebban, to raise, to 
heave. Another derivative is Jiedfod, a head. 

17 God, the Holy Name, (with short vowel,) from the adjective god, good. 
Inversely, man in Anglo-Saxon is used derivatively to mean sin. 



112 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE SEMI-SAXON PERIOD. 
A. D. 1066— A. D. 1250. 

TRANSITION OF THE SAXON TONGUE INTO THE ENGLISH, 

1. Character of the Language in this Stage — Duration of the Period. — 2. The 
Kinds of Corruptions — Illustrated by Examples. — 3. Extract from 
the Saxon Chronicle Translated and Analyzed. — 4. Layamon's Brut — 
Analysis of its Language — Comparison with Language of the Chronicle. 
— 5. Extract from Layamon Translated and Analyzed. 

1. We are next to watch the Anglo-Saxon language at the earliest 
stages in that series of mutations, by which it passed into the 
Modern English. 

When these began, it is not possible to say with precision. It 
cannot have been much later than the Norman Conquest ; it may 
have been a century earlier, and probably was so. Our manu- 
scripts show some tokens of them ; and, as there is reason to be- 
lieve, they appeared soonest in the Northern Dialect. 

At present it may suffice for us to know, that the changes as- 
sumed, in succession, two very distinct types, marking two eras 
quite dissimilar. 

First came a period throughout which the old language was pal- 
pably suffering disorganization and decay, without exhibiting any 
symptoms which the most intelligent observer could, at the time, 
have interpreted as presaging a return to completeness and consist- 
ency. This was a Transition- era, a period of confusion, alike per- 
plexing to those who then used the tongue, and to those who now 
endeavour to trace its vicissitudes. The state of chaos came to 
an end about the middle of the thirteenth century, a little earlier, 
or a little later. One of our best antiquaries sets down its close as 
occurring about the year 1230.* These approximate dates give it a 
duration of nearly two centuries from the Conquest. It is to this 

* Sir Frederick Madden ; in his Edition of Layamon's Brut, 1847. 



TRANSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH. 113 

stage of the language that our philologers now assign the name of 
Semi-Saxon. 

With it, in the meantime, our business lies. We shall afterwards 
study the second era, that period of Re-construction, during the 
whole of which the language may correctly be described as English. 

2. Let a classical scholar imagine a case like this. In the Dark 
Ages of Italy, when the Latin was spoken barbarously, and the new 
language had not yet come into being, an ill-educated Eoman monk 
endeavours to chronicle the calamities of the Eternal City, duly 
remembering those of his own convent. The etymology and syntax 
of a complex language, whose rules he has never studied, will fare 
badly in his hands. The forms of the Latin verb, for instance, will 
be prodigiously simplified, the personal pronouns being carefully pre- 
fixed to prevent mistakes : and, this precaution having been taken, 
" nos scripsi" will seem quite as good as " nos scripsunus." The 
troublesome government of the prepositions, too, will be escaped 
from, as soon as it has become the fashion to give nouns no case 
but one ; and " sub mons " may, perhaps, be forced to do duty 
both for " sub monte" and " sub montem." The genders of sub- 
stantives, again, will often be used wrongly, in a language which 
determines these chiefly by the endings of the words. The voca- 
bulary itself, although it will hold out longer than the grammar, 
cannot answer all the demands which an ill-instructed writer has to 
make on it. Our Roman annalist m.ay, when he is lamenting the 
mischiefs wrought by Totila the Goth, recollect, for some idea he 
has, no fit word but one which had been let fall by the barbarian 
troops in their occupation of the city, and had taken root on the 
banks of the Tiber. 

Now, although this was not in all points what happened in Italy, 
it was, substantially, the earliest part of the process by which the 
Anglo-Saxon tongue passed, through a state of ruin, into the regu- 
lar English. The later parts of the Saxon Chronicle were composed 
exactly in the circumstances of the imaginary case ; and some of 
the results are close parallels to those which are there figured. The 
language written is nothing else than ungrammatical Anglo-Saxon, 
inflection and syntax being alike frequently incorrect ; and the 
leading solecisms are plainly such as must have been current in 
the time of the writers, being the rudiments of forms which soon 
became characteristic features in the infant English. The intro- 
duction of new words from Norman roots is rare ; but some of the 
instances are curious. We cannot suppose the poor monk of Peter- 
borough, writing in the twelfth century, to have forgotten his native 
word for " peace." But, in registering the death of Henry the 



114 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

First, he disdained to bestow, on the quiet which that able king 
enforced throughout England, the sacred name which suggested the 
idea of freedom.^' 

3. The passage which will illustrate for us this state of things, 
is from the Saxon Chronicle. It occurs in a frightful description 
of the miseries inflicted on the peasantry by the nobles, during the 
disturbed reign of Stephen. Therefore it must have been written 
after that king's death; though it bears the date of 1137. f 

Hi swencten^ the^ wi'ecce-^ men of the land^ mid castel- 
They oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle- 
weorces.^ Tha the castles^ waren^ maked,^ tha fylden^ 
works. When the castles were made, then filled 

hi mid yvele men.^^ Tha namen^^ hi th^^^ men the 

they (them) with evil men. Then toolc they the men whom 



1 Infin. swencan, to vex, fatigue, labour; old English, siuinJc, used by 
Milton. The preterite plural retains its final syllable, but not purely : it 
should be swencton. This -en for -on was one of the most permanent of the 
changes. 

2 The Undeclined article, formerly used often for the Declined, was now 
used almost always. 

3 Should be wreccan. The writer has lost one of the nicest distinctions of 
the Anglo-Saxon, that between the Definite and the Indefinite forms of the 
adjective (as in modern German). 

^ The Nominative for the Dative lande. The monk has forgotten the regi- 
men of the preposition, or did not know the declension, or never thought of the 
matter. An old Anglo-Saxon, indeed, would have used the genitive of land 
without a preposition. 

^ Here the Dative plural weorcum is lost, and the Nominative used instead. 
, 6 A double corruption. (1.) Castel should have been declined in one of 
the neuter forms, which gives the nominative plural like the nominative sin- 
gular. (2.) The masculine form which the monk attempts to follow, should 
have its nominative plural m -as. See the Extract from Alfred, Note 42. Ob- 
serve, further, that the simplest of the masculine declensions of the Anglo- 
Saxon (which is exemplified in the note just referred to), v/as the one that 
lingered longest, and founded our English possessive and plural. 

7 For wceron. See Note 1. 

8 For macod or gemacod; from inf. macian. 

9 See Note 1. 

10 Nominative for Dative both in substantive and adjective. 

11 See Note 1. The word is from inf. 7iiman (Glerman, iiehmen), still pre- 
served in thieves' slang, and in the name of Shakspeare's Corporal Nym. 

12 An accusative plural, not unauthorized by older use. 



* Peace in Anglo-Saxon is fritJi [Germ, friede] ; Free is f red or fri6: but 
some of their derivatives seem to interchange meanings. " Peace {pais, 
Norman, the modern paix),'" says the monk, in summing up the character of 
the king, " peace he made for man and beast." 

t Ingram's " Saxon Chronicle, with an English Translation," 1823. 



TKAKSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH. 115 

hi wenden^^ thset ani^^ god hefden,^^ bathe^*^ be nihtes^'' 

they tliought that any goods {they) had, hath by night 
and be daeies.^^ Me^^ henged^^ up bi the fet,^! and 

and by day. {Some) men hanged {they) up by the feet, and 
smoked-^ heom mid fiil^^ smoke : ^'^ me dide^^ cnotted^'' 

smoked them loith foul smoke : {some) men did {they) knotted 
strenges abiitan here^'' hgeved,^^ and writhen-^ to-thaet^^ it^^ 
strings aboid their head, and twisted till it 

gsede-"^^ to the hsernes.^^ 
went to the brain. 

4. Our cursory survey of the Semi-Saxon brings us now to 
Layamon's Metrical Clironicle, tlie " Brut," which belongs to the 
end of the twelfth century, or the beginning of the thirteenth. 

The editor of the poem has subjected its language to a masterly 
analysis, the chief results of which are easily understood, and pro- 
is See Note 1. From inf. loenan ; ic wene, I ween (old English). 
1^ For dnig or cenig ; the Terminating Consonant dropped. 

15 For hcefdon : See Note 1. Irregularities of spelling are constant in the 
Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of all ages. 

16 The original of both (Scottish, haitJi) ; hut the pure Anglo-Saxon is (ad- 
jective) bd, begen, or bdtwd (both-two). 

17 Meant as a Genitive of niht : a praiseworthy attempt at grammar. But 
(1.) niht seems to have properly nihte in the genitive. (2.) Be or bei should 
have had a dative, nihte. The word nihtes, by night (like modern German), 
used adverbially, would have been good Anglo-Saxon. 

18 For dceges, genitive of dceg ; should have been the dative, dcege : See 
Note 17. Good Anglo-Saxon is dceges, by day. 

19 Yery common in Semi-Saxon MSS., for man or men. 

20 A very instructive example of innovations. The u-regular verb hen, to 
hang, has in pret. ic heng^ we hengon. Our monk and his contemporaries, 
(1.) seem to have formed a new infinitive, such as hengan ; (2.) they have 
made from it a regular preterite henged (more correctly hengede) ; (3.) they 
liave then dropped the plural termination, which would have given hengedon. 
This loss of the Last Syllable in the Plm'als is especially noteworthy. For 
it is a decided step towards English. 

21 Sing./u«; plur./ota, or sometimes /ei ; see also Note 4. 

22 Inf. sraeucan^ smocian, or sraecan (Scottish, smeeJc) ; pret. ic smedc, we 
smucon. The Plural -on is lost ; See Note 20. 

23 The adjective robbed of its cases ; should be d^^Lfulum. 

24 /Smeoce, smece, or smice, dat. 

2^ Plural termination lost ; See Note 20. For the verb, see Alfred, Note 94. 

26 For cnottede ; Plural of adjective lost. 

27 For hira or heora ; see Alfred, Note 11. 

28 Correctly, heafod. Grammar right, (perhaps by accident,) abutan taking 
an accusative, and the noun having the nominative and accusative alike. 

2^ Inf. lorithan (English, writhe) ; See Note 1. 

30 To-thcet, for oth, or some such word : unusual. 

31 Correctly, hit. See Alfred, Note 11. Another approach to English. 

32 An attempt to inflect an irregular verb regularly. For the verb, see 
Alfred, Note 44. 

33 A noun singular : perhaps not old Anglo-Saxon , (Scottish, harns.) 



116 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

vide very valuable materials for those who study the early history 
of our English tongue. 

We have to take account, first, of the words constituting the 
vocabulary ; and, secondly, of the manner in which these are dealt 
with when they are combined in sentences. 

The Vocabulary is especially instructive. Written a century 
and a half after the Norman Conquest, the Brut has hardly any 
words that are not Anglo-Saxon. Containing more than thirty-two 
thousand lines, it has not, in the older of its two manuscripts, so 
many as fifty French words, although we include in the list new 
words taken through that tongue from the Latin ; and, of those 
which it has, several had been introduced earlier, bemg found in 
the Saxon Chronicle. In a more recent text, supposed to belong 
to the reign of Henry the Third, about thirty of the French words 
are retained, and upwards of forty others are added. 

We have thus decisive proof of an assertion, which we found 
reason to believe when we reviewed the literature of the Norman 
period. The immediate effects of the Conquest, even on the Vo- 
cabulary of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, were by no means so con- 
siderable as they were once believed to have been. 

In respect of Etymology and Syntax, again, Layamon's devia- 
tions from the Anglo-Saxon are set down for us in several articles ; 
and of them we may take, first, those (and the proportion is sur- 
prisingly large) of which it happens that instances have occurred 
to us in our short extract from the Saxon Chronicle. 

Fu'st : There is a general disregard of Inflections in the Substan- 
tives : and Masculine forms are given to neuters in the plural. Indeed, 
the inflections of the Anglo-Saxon nouns were so complex, that our 
grammars are not yet quite at one in describing them. Instances, 
which have just been noted in the Chronicle, lead us towards this 
very important fact ; that the declension which lingered longest 
was the simplest of those that had been used for Masculine Substan- 
tives, a declension giving a genitive singular in -e-s, and a nominative 
plural in -as. The -plural ending was, as we have seen, corrupted 
into -es ; the declension, so changed, then usurped the place of the .. 
more difficult ones in a great majority of the most common words ; 
and this was the foundation of our modern genitive in '5, and of 
our plural in s or es. 

Secondly : There was a like disregard of Gender, which had in 
most instances been fixed by termination, according to rules both 
difficult and uncertain, like those which still perplex learners in 
the continental Gothic tongues. Not only were the names of 
things without life masculine, feminine, or neuter, accordmg to 



TRANSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH. 117 

their endings ; but some names of living creatures were neuter, the 
termination overbearing the meaning.* Confusion was inevitable 
in a time when the language was neglected : and a very obvious 
remedy presented itsell', after a while, in our modern rule of deter- 
mining all genders by the signification of the words. 

Thirdly : The Definite and Indefinite Declensions of Adjectives 
are confounded ; and the Feminine terminations of adjectives and 
pronguns are neglected. We have seen, in the Chronicle, the in- 
flectional terminations of the adjectives disappearing altogether; 
although some of these did not altogether lose their hold for many 
generations.f 

Fourthly : there is an occasional use of the Weak preterites and 
participles of verbs, (the forms which our grammarians have been 
accustomed to call Regular,) instead of the Strong or Irregular forms. 

Fifthly : There is a constant substitution of -en for -on in the 
Plurals of Verbs ; and the final -e is often discarded. 

Sixthly : There is great uncertainty in the Government of Pre- 
positions. 

Having already encountered aU the corruptions thus enumerated, 
we have reaUy few others to learn, and none that are nearly so 
important. A few there are, however, which throw light on the 
formation of the new tongue. 

Besides the article an (stiU used also as a numeral, and declined), 
our other article a now appears, being used as indeclinable, and 
prefixed to consonants, as with us. The gender of nouns, pretty 
correct in the earlier text, is less so in the later ; and the feminine 
is often neglected altogether. In respect of pronouns, the accusa- 
tive him for hine, (abeady traceable in the Chronicle,) appears fre- 
quently in the later text ; and in it, too, the relative takes the un- 
declined form ivoche, instead of the older lohilc or wide. The con- 
jugation of verbs is generally that of the Anglo-Saxon, with the 
exceptions already noted : but it sufiers also certain other changes, 
which lead us fast towards English. The preposition to is inserted 
before infinitives ; the common infinitive termination -an is changed 
into -en (as likewise elsewhere the final -a into -e) ; the final -n of 

* Thus, w/l/, a woman, was neuter. The word was not promoted to the 
dignity of real gender till it was compounded in wif-man (literally, a female- 
man), whence comes woman. 

t " All the indefinite inflections of the adjective may he found in the manu- 
scripts of the thirteenth century ; but there is much inconsistency in the 
manner of using them, and that sometimes even in the same manuscript. 
The only inflections (of the adjective) which survived long enough to affect 
the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries, were those of the nomina- 
tive and genitive plural." Guest: in the Transactions of the Philological 
Society; vol. i. : 1844. 



118 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

the infinitive is omitted, sometimes in the earlier manuscript, and 
generally in the later ; and a difficult gerundive form in -nne or ne^ 
(which has not happened to occur to us,) is indeed retained, but is 
confounded with the present participle m -nde^ the original of our 
participle in -ing. 

5. A few lines of the Brut, with the scantiest annotation, may 
suffice to exemplify these remarks, and serve, in some degree, as a 
ground of comparison with the older diction of the Chronicle.- 

Our extract is from the account of the great battle of Bath, in 
which the illustrious Arthur is said to have signally discomfited the 
Saxons. The semi-stanzas are separated by colons.* 

Ther weoren Ssexisce men ; folken^ alre^ sermest ; ^ 
There were Saxon men of -folks all most-wretched; 
And tha Alemainisce men : geomeresf^ aire leoden : ^ 
And the Alemannish men saddest of -all nations. 
Arthur mid his sweorde : fseie-scipe^ wurhte : 
Arthur with his sword death-worh wrought. 
Al that he smat to : hit wes sone''' fordon ; 
All that he smote to, it was soon done-for. 
Al wses the king abolgen : ^ swa bith^ the wilde bar : 
All was the king enraged, as is the wild hoar. 
* * * * 

Tha isaeh Arthur : athelest^^ kingen : ^^ 
When saw Arthur, noblest of kings, 
Whar^2 Colgrim at-stod : and secstaP^ wrohte : 
Where Colgrim at-stood, and eke place worked, 
Th^ clupede the king : kenliche lude : 
Then called the king, keenly loud: 



^ For folca; genitive plural, oifolc. 

2 Ealra (sometimes alra) is the correct genitive plural of call or all. 

3 Literally, j»oores^ (German). * See Csedmon, Note 5. 

5 For leodo.; from leod (Grerman, leute). 

6 Literally, fey-sMp ; Anglo-Saxon, fcege ; Scottish, fey. See Guy Man- 
nering. 

' For sona. ^ Good Anglo-Saxon from inf. abelgan. 

9 Good Anglo-Saxon. The verb heon, to be, gives, in the present, ic heo, 
thu byst, lie hyth ; and wesan, to be, gives ic eom, thu eart, lie is. 
^* Superlative from the Anglo-Saxon, cethel or ethel (German, edeVj. 
11 The error marked in Note 1. ^^ Modern spelling, for liw-. 

1^ Hence stall; perhaps here it Taeans JigJit ; whence stalwart, brave. 

* Madden 's Layamon, iii. 468-471 ; the text of the older manuscript. The 
passage, with a translation, is also in Guest's " History of English Rhythms," 
vol. ii. 1838. 



TRANSITION OF SAXON INTO ENGLISH. 119 

Nu him is al swa there gat : ther he^^ thene hul wat : 
Now io-him is all as to-the goat, where she the hill keeps. 
Thenne cumeth the wulf wilde : touward hire winden : ^^ 
Then comes the wolf wild, toward her tracks: 
Theh the wulf beon^*^ ane : biiten selc imane :^^ 
Though the wolf he one, without all company, 
And ther weoren in ane lolcen : fif hundred gaten : 
And there were in one fold five hundred goats, 
The wulf heom to iwiteth : ^^ and alle heom abiteth : 

The wolf them to cometh, and all them hiteth. 
* * * * 

Ich am wulf, and he is gat : the gume^^ seal beon faie :^^ 
/ am wolf, and he is goat : the man shall he fey ! 

1* The word gat is first used correctly as feminine, being joined with 
there; and then it is held as masculine, being represented by Tie. But, 
possibly, he may be a corruption for the feminine heo, which seems to have 
sometimes taken that form in the later dialect of the west. See Transac- 
tions of the Philological Society: vol. i. p. 279: 1844. 

15 A noun from windan, to wind or twine. 

16 Plural of subjunctive ; wrongly used for singular. 

17 From man ; as the Old English and Scottish word, menye or meinye, a 
company. 

18 Witan, to depart. i^ Anglo-Saxon, gumia. 2° See Note G. 



120 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



CHAPTEE III, 

THE OLD ENGLISH PEEIOD. 
A. D. 1250— A. D. 1500. 

FORMATION OF THE STRUCTURE OP THE ENGLISH TONGUE. 

1. Principle of the Change — Inflections deserted — Suhstitutes to be found — 
The First Step already exemplified. — 2. Stages of the Ee-Construction — 
Early English— Middle English. Early English. — 3. Character of the 
Early English — Specimens. — 4. Extract from The OavI and the Night- 
ingale. — 5. Extract from the Legend of Thomas Becket. Middle 
English. — 6. Character of Middle English— The Main Features of the 
Modern Tongue established — Changes in Grammar — Changes in Vo- 
cabulary—Specimens — Chaucer. — 7. Extracts from Prologue to the Can- 
terbury Tales.— 8. Extracts from the Knight's Tale.— 9. Specimen of 
Chaucer's Prose. — 10. Language in the Early Part of the Fifteenth Cen- 
tury — Extract from Lydgate's Churl and Bird. — 11. Language in the Lat- 
ter Part of the Fifteenth Century — Its Character — The Structure of the 
English Tongue substantially Completed — Extract from The Paston Let- 
ters. The Language of Scotland. — 12. A Gothic Dialect in North- 
Eastern Counties — An Anglo-Saxon Dialect in Southern Counties — 
Changes as in England. — 13. The Scottish Tongue in the Fourteenth 
Century — Extract from Barbour's Bruce. — 14. Great Changes in the Fif- 
teenth Century — Extract from Dunbar's Thistle and Eose. 

1. Escaping from the perplexities of the Semi-Saxon, we have 
reached an era in which the language may reasonably be called 
English. The principles in respect of which our modern speech 
deviates from its Germanic root, now begin to operate actively. 

Some of the changes which have already been observed by us, 
suggest and illustrate these principles : others may seem to lead us 
away from them. The primary law is exemplified by very many of 
the words we have analyzed. It is this. 

The Anglo-Saxon, like the Latin, though not to the same extent, 
was rich in inflections : a given idea being denoted by a given word, 
many of the modifications of that idea could be expressed by changes 
in the form of the word, without aid from any other words. In 
the course of the revolution, most of the inflections disappeared. 
Consequently, in expressing the modifications of an idea denoted 



THE PERIOD OF EARLY ENGLISH. 121 

by a given word, the new language has oftenest to join with that 
word other words denotmg relations. 

Such a change occurs when the inflections of a Latin verb 
have their place supplied by auxiliary verbs, and those of the noun 
by prepositions. It is exemplified when the genitive " Romse" is 
translated into the French " De Rome," and " Nos amavimus" 
into " Nous avons aim^." 

The first step of it has been exemplified, again and again, in the^ 
Semi- Saxon passages which we have analyzed. If we were to try 
the experiment of blotting out, in our extracts, every word that has 
not had its inflection corrupted, we should find that very few words 
indeed were left. Sometimes a word has lost its inflected part, and, 
along with it, the idea expressed by the inflection. Many words 
which originally had diverse inflected terminations have all been 
made to end alike, the inflection thus coming to signify nothing. 
Perhaps, also, it may have occurred to some readers, that the verbs 
had suffered less alteration than the substantives and adjectives. 
If we have made this remark on the few words contained in our 
specimens, we had better not lose sight of it. It will immediately 
appear to be true universally. 

2. We now enter on the period of Re- construction, which may be 
described as extending from the middle of the thirteenth century 
through the fourteenth and fifteenth. The language of those two 
hundred and fifty years may be called Old English. 

It first appears in a state so equivocal, that we may be inclined 
to doubt whether it deserves to be called English at all. But 
when we leave it, at the close of this period, it has assumed a shape ' 
really dififerent in no essential feature from the English of modern 
times. The critic to whom we owe our dissection of Layamon's 
Semi-Saxon has proposed, for the sake of convenience, to arrange 
this new development of the tongue m two successive stages. The 
first of these, reaching for a century from his approximate date of 
1230, he calls Early English. He gives the name of Middle Eng- 
lish to the speech of the period between 1330 and 1500. 

It is not possible to fix on any point of time, at which the dis- 
tinction between the two stages is clear on both sides. Nor, though 
we disregard dates, is the line between the two marked very deeply, 
at all its points, by internal characteristics. , Yet there are evident 
steps of progress, which may aptly be denoted by the use of the two 
descriptive terms. 

EARLY ENGLISH. 

3. As our usher into the region of the Early English, we may 

F 



122 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

accept the fine poem of " The Owl and the Nightingale," already- 
described when we were introduced to the poetry of the Norman 
period. It occupies a doubtful position, both in the character of 
its language and in respect of its date, which perhaps should not be 
carried forward so far as even the beginning of the fourteenth 
century. 

Still it shows so near an approach to intelligible English, that 
our specimen may be risked without a full translation. 

4. It wUl perhaps be obvious, when the extract has been read, 
that there is now a distinct change in order as weU as in structure. 
There are not a few remnants of inflection, with many symptoms of 
its retu-ement, and of the accompanying abbreviations. The pas- 
sage shows clearly one of the features usually insisted on as char- 
acteristic of the earliest stage of the new tongue ; namely, that 
the Anglo-Saxon vowels -a, -e, -u, in final syllables, are all of them 
represented by -e. The final -n of the infinitive verb is beginning 
to disappear; and the infinitive and the noun, thus ceasing to be 
distinguishable by form, alike dropped also, in no long time, the final 
vowel. It should be observed, however, that here, when the final 
-e represents any vowel of the older language, it ought to make a 
syllable, and be reckoned in the accentual scanning of the line.* 

Hule,^ thu axest^ me, (ho^ seide), 
Gif ich* kon^ eni other dede, 
Bute^ singen in sumer tide, 
And bringe blisse"^ for^ and wide. 
Wi^ axestu^*^ of craftes^^ mine ? 
Betere is min on^^ than aUe thine. 
And lyst, ich telle the ware-vore.^^ 
— Wostu^"* to-than^^ man was i-bore ?^^ 

I Owl; Anglo-Saxon, wZe. 2 Vulgar English. 

3 She. The word is almost pure Anglo-Saxon. 

4 For ^c, I : already met with in Layamon, 

5 Know, from Anglo-Saxon ; English, con. 

6 But ; Anglo-Saxon preposition, butan. 

■^ Anglo-Saxon dative ; the final -e used as a distinct syllable. 
8 Far; Anglo-Saxon, /eor. 9 Why ; Anglo-Saxon, hwL 

10 Askest thou ; an unessential contraction. 

II Crafts, arts; Anglo-Saxon, crceft ; plur. crceftas. 12 One. 
13 Wherefore. 1* Wottest thou ? Tcnowest thou f 

15 To-what ; than, a form of the dative of the article ; used also in Anglo- 
Saxon as relative and demonstrative. 

16 Born ; Anglo-Saxon, geboren, from heran. 

* Here, and in subsequent extracts, the vowel, both final and in the middle 
of words, is marked (• •), when the syllable in which it occurs should be taken 
account of in the prosody, and is likely to be overlooked. The text of the 
extract is chiefly from Wright's edition, (Percy Society,) 1843. 



THE PERIOD OF EARLY ENGLISH. 123 

To thare^^ blisse^^ of hovene-riche,^^ 
Thar^o ever is song and murhthe^^ i-liche.^^ 

* * * * 

Vor-thi^^ men singth^* in holi chirche, 
And clerkes guineth^^ songes wirche '^^' 
That man^'' i-thenche^^ bi the songe, 
Wider^^ he shall : and thar bon'^° longe, 
That he the murhthe ne vorgete,^^ 

Ac thar-of thenche and bigete.^^ 

* % * * 

Hi^^ riseth up to^* midel nichte, 
And singeth of the hovene lihte ; 
And prostes^^ upe^^ londe^^ singeth, 
Wane^^ the liht of daie springeth ; 
And ich hom^^ helpe wat^*^ I mai : 
Ich singe mid*^ horn niht and dai ! 

5. The Chronicle of Eobert of Gloucester, which in our literary 
review was referred to the close of the thirteenth century, has com- 
monly been received, and very frequently quoted, as an indisputable 
specimen of Early English, and perhaps the oldest that can be 
assigned to a fixed date. 

Instead of quoting from it, we wUl take our specimen from one 
of the pieces contained in a collection of Monkish Legends, which 
have plausibly been attributed to the same author, and are at all 
events very like his Chronicle in style. The story mixes up devo- 
tion, history, and romance, in a manner which seems to us very 
odd, but is quite common in our old literature. 

A young London citizen, going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, 
was taken prisoner by the Saracens. The daughter of his master 
fell in love with him ; and, when he had made his escape, eloped to 

1'^ The ; Anglo-Saxon, thcere. See Alfred, Note 15. 

18 The dative termination here written, but not sounded ; compare Note 7. 

19 Heaven-hingdom. 

20 Where; Anglo-Saxon, thcer^ demonstrative and relative. 

21 Mirth. 22 i^Iq (obscure). 23 Therefore. 

24 The termination -th in the plurals of pres. indie, is Anglo-Saxon. 

25 Begin. 26 To worTc. 27 Anglo-Saxon for one ; French, on. 
28 Thinh; subjunctive. 29 Whither ; Anglo-Saxon, hwider. 

^^ There may-he ; heon^ Anglo-Saxon ; plural of subjunctive for singular. 

31 Forget; subjunctive. ^2 Seeh ; Anglo-Saxon, hegitan. 

•■« See Alfred, Note 11. 34 jt. 

35 Priests; Anglo-Saxon, ^reosi. 36 XJpon. ^7 Land. 

38 When ; Anglo-Saxon, hwoenne. 

39 Anglo-Saxon, heom; see Alfred, Note 11. 

*o What ; Anglo-Saxon, hwoet. 4i gee Alfred, Note 43. 



124 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

follow him. With no syllable of European speech but the one 
word " London," she found her way from Jerusalem into England, 
and was found by her lover, searching for him through the street 
in which he lived. She was, of course, christened and married to 
him : and their son was the celebrated Thomas a Becket. 

The following are a few of the opening lines in the Legend which 
celebrates the ambitious samt and martyr. The measure is the 
common metre of the psalms, the four lines being here written in 
two, and the break indicated, as before, by a colon. It will not 
escape notice that we now begin to encounter French words, almost 
always expressmg ideas which had become familiar to the people 
through their Norman masters.* 

Gilbert was Thomas fader name : that true was and god, 

And lovede Grod and holi churche : siththe^ he wit understod. 

The croice^ to the holie lond : in his yunghede^ he nom,* 

And mid on^ Kichard, that was his man : to Jerusalem com. 

There hi^ dude^ here^ pelrynage :^ in holi stedes^^ faste ; 

So that among the Sarazyns : ynome^^ hi were atte laste. 

Hi and other Cristene men : and in strong prisoun^^ ido,^^ 

In meseise^* and in pyne ynough : of hunger and chile also, 

For fui other half yer :^^ greate pyne hi hadde and schame, 

In the Princes hous of the lawe : Admiraud^^ was his name. 

Ac G-ilbert of London : best grace^^ hadde there. 

Of the Prince and alle his : among aUe that ther were, 

For ofte al in feteres : and in other bende,-"^^ 

The Prince he servede atte mete : for him thochte^^ hende.^*^ 
* * * * 

And nameliche^^ thurf ^^ a maid : that this Gilbert lovede faste. 
The Prince's douchter Admu'aud : that hire hurte^^ al upe^^ 
him caste. 

1 Since. 2 French, instead of the Anglo-Saxon, rod^ rood. 

3 Youth. The Anglo-Saxon termination -Aec? gives our -Twod. 

* Took; see Saxon Chronicle, Note 11. ^ 0,^, 

6 They; see Alfred, Note 11. 

7 See Alfred, Note 94 : the u for y occurs in Layamon, and is said to be- 
long to a western dialect. 

8 Their: see Alfred, Note 11. ^ Pilgriihage ; French. 
10 Places. 11 Taken ; See Note 4. 

12 French ; found in Layamon, second text. ^3 Done, put 

1* Misease ; perhaps French. 

15 Other-half-year ; i. e. a year and a half; good modern German. A 
parallel Teutonism is the Scottish half-nine o^clock, for half-past eight. 

16 French ; in Layamon, second text. i^ French. 

18 Bands. i^ See Alfred, Note 55. 20 Dexterous, handy. 

21 Especially. 22 Through. 23 ffeart. 24 iPpoji, 

* Black's " Life and Martyrdom of Thomas Beket ;" (Percy Society ;) 1845. 



^ 



THE PERIOD OP MIDDLE ENGLISH. 125 



And eschte^^ him of Engelonde : and of the manere there, 

And of the lyf of Cristene men : and what here bileve^^ were. 

The manere of Engelonde : this Gilbert hire tolde fore, 

And the toun het^^ Londone : that he was inne^^ ibore,^^ 

And the bileve of Cristene men : this blisse withouten ende, 

In hevene schal here mede^^ beo : whan hi schulle henne^^ wende.^^ 
* * * * 

" Ich wole,"^^ heo seide, " al mi lond : leve for love of the, 
And Cristene womman become : if thu wolt spousi^* me." 

MIDDLE ENGLISH. 

6. That new stage of the language, which has been called Middle 
English, presents itself quite unequivocally in the latter half of the 
fourteenth century. It was used by Chaucer and Wycliffe : we 
read it at this day in passages of our noblest poetry, and in our first 
complete translation of the Holy Scriptures. 

Thus iateresting as the organ both of inventive genius and of 
divine truth, it is, in aU essentials, so like to our own every-day 
speech, that there is hardly any thing except the antique spelling, 
(capricious and incorrect in all our old books, besides being unusual,) 
to prevent any tolerable English scholar from understanding readily 
almost every word of it. Further, it has peculiarities so weU 
marked as to make it easily distinguishable in every particular 
instance, both from the forms of the tongue that are much older, 
and from those that are perfectly modernized. Yet our philologers 
are not quite agreed ia their way of describing it. 

The truth is this. On the one hand, this form of our language 
is easily understood ; because the foundations of the grammatical 
system which rules in Modem English had been immovably laid, 
and were by all good writers regularly built on. On the other hand, 
its exact character is not easily analyzed ; because now, more per- 
haps than in any preceding period, the modes of speech were rapidly 
undergoing transformation in minor points. There stiU lingered 
vestiges of the antique, which could not but very soon melt away. 
Although, of the Anglo-Saxon forms which the men of this genera- 
tion inherited, many were immediately dropped, many others were 

25 AsJced 26 Belief. 27 Sight, was called; see Alfred, Note 18. 

28 In, in it. 29 Born. so Meed, reward. 

31 Anglo-Saxon, heona, heonon, hence. 

32 Wend, to go ; still in use. 33 WiH 

34 Infinitive in -i, -ie, or -y ; found in Layamon, and held to be a token of 
western dialect. 



126 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

still retained after they had lost their old significance : the step 
which still remained to be taken, was the abandoning of the forms 
which had thus become useless. Examples are the vowel-endings, 
no longer indicative of difference in gender or declension. It is 
observable, likewise, that writers evidently had not yet become 
aware, how thorough a remodelling of arrangement was called for 
by the new forms which the nouns had assumed. 

A few specific features should be noticed. In the first place, the 
Anglo-Saxon rules for the Gender of Substantives having, as we 
have seen, been long applied with great caprice and uncertainty, the 
principle of fixing gender by termination was now deserted alto- 
gether. AU names of things without life were, as ever afterwards, 
treated as neuters. The Semi-Saxon Infinitive in -en was some- 
times retained ; sometimes the final -n was dropped, as it soon was 
always ; and this step was speedily followed by the dropping of the 
-e, which had then become of no use. Another change now grew 
common in the Plurals of the Present Indicative. These had ended 
in -ath^ afterwards in -eih (or in -es in the northern Semi-Saxon, 
as, "We hopes"). They now passed into -m, though not al- 
ways.* 

One other change, and that a mighty one, now affected the Vo- 
cabulary. This, as we learned long ago, was the age during which 
began in earnest the naturalizing of words from the French. The 
innovations which the terrors of the Norman lash had been power- 
less to enforce, were voluntarily adopted by the literary men, ad- 
miringly emulous of the wealth of expression offered by their foreign 
poetical models. There is only a slight introduction of French 
words in such books as Piers Plowman, appealing to national and 
practical interests, and expressly designed for circulation among the 
mass of the people. But Chaucer's poems, and Gower's, are studded 
all over with them : and the style of these favourite writers exer- 
cised a commanding influence ever after. 

In reading a few passages from Chaucer, we must take with us 
one or two rules as to his versification, a matter not yet altogether 
clear, but much less dark than it once was. We must call to mind, 
once again, the doctrine, (which cannot be too anxiously insisted on,) 
that here, as elsewhere in our language, the safest way of scanning 
is by the accents, not by the number of syllables. The versification 
of Christabel, and that of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, are good 

* The plural form in -th has lately been found surviving in a peculiar dia- 
lect occupying the barony of Forth, in the Irish county of Wexford. The 
district was colonized by Englishmen, brought over by Strongbow in the 
year 1170. Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. iv. 1850. 



THE PERIOD OP MIDDLE ENGLISH. 127 

modern examples : indeed they are modelled on our antique poetry. 
This principle we should apply boldly, remembering that we read 
verses constructed in an unripe dialect, and in an uncritical time. 
If we freely run unemphatic syllables into each other, a manly and 
vigorous melody will often be heard in lines which would defy all 
scrupulous prosody. It is also important to observe, that the em- 
phasis was by no means fixed on certain syllables of words with the 
precision of modern pronunciation ; that there is great vacillation in 
the accenting of many common words ; and that the accentuation 
of the half-naturalized French forms is especially capricious. The 
prosodial value of the final -e is still the great point of dissension 
among Chaucer's critics. Sometimes it is a syllable ; sometimes it 
is not : and contradictory rules have been proposed for distinguish- 
ing the cases. Perhaps the truth is nearly this : that generally, 
though not always, the -e has a syllabic force when it represents 
either an old inflexion or the mute e of the French ; and (it has 
also been said) when it is an adverbial ending. Many difficult scan- 
nings wiU also be disposed of by this remark ; that the terminat- 
ing -e may or should be omitted in pronunciation, when the next 
word begins with a vowel or an ^.* 

7. Our first Extracts are two passages occurring in the Prologue 
of the Tales. They are taken from the description of the Parish 
Priest or Parson, and that of the Squire. 

A good man was ther of religioun. 
And was a pore Persoun of a toun : 
But riche he was of holy thought and werk. 
He was also a lerned man, a clerk, 
That Cristes gospel truly wolde preche : 
His parischens^ devoutly would he teche. 
Benigne he was, and wondur dUigent, 
And in adversite ful pacient. 

* * * « 

Wyd was his parisch, and houses fer asondur ;^ 
But he ne lafte^ not* for reyn ne^ thondur, 

1 Parishioners. The u for e which afterwards occurs frequently in final 
syllables (as wondur for wonder) is worth noting. It exemplifies those in- 
termediate sounds of unaccented vowels, to which our language owes so 
many of its irregularities both in pronunciation and in spelling. 

2 A line requiring, for the melody, a running together of unaccented syl- 
lables. 3 Left^ ceased^ omitted. 

* Two negatives ; Anglo-Saxon. ^ Both not and nor ; here nor. 

* Wright's " Canterbury Tales" (Percy Society) : the text of which is 
followed in the extracts. It will be remarked that the same word is not al- 
ways spelt exactly in the same way. This feature of the old manuscripts 
seemed worth preserving. 



128 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

In sicknesse ne in meschief to visite 
The ferrest^ in his parische, moche and lite/ 
Uppon his feet, and in his hond a staf. 
This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf,^ 
That ferst he wroughte, and after that he taughte. 
Out of the gospel he tho^ wordes caughte : 
And this figure he addid yit thereto ; 
That, if gold ruste, what schulde yren doo ? 
For, if a priest be foul, on whom we truste, 
No wondur is a lewid man^° to ruste. 

* * * * 

To drawe folk to heven by faimesse. 
By good ensample, was his busynesse : 
But^^ it were eny persone obstuiat, 
What so^^ he were, of high or lowe estat : 
Him wolde he snybbe-*^^ scharply for the nones. ^^ 
A bettre priest I trowe ther nowher non is. 
' He waytud after no pomp ne reverence; 
Ne maked him a spiced conscience. 
But Cristes love, and his apostles twelve, 
He taught ; and fers£ he folwed it himselve ! 



With him^ ther was his sone, a yong squyer, 

A lovyer, and a lusty bacheler ; 

With lokkes crulle^ as^ they were layde in presse : 

Of twenty yeer he was of age, I gesse. 

Of his stature he was of evene lengthe. 

And wondurly delyver,* and gret of strengthe. 

And he hadde ben somtyme in chivachie,^ 

In Flaundres, in Artoys, and in Picardie, 

And born him wel, as in so litel space, 

In hope to stonden in his lady grace. 

Embrowdid^ was he, as it were a mede 

Al ful of fresshe floures, white and reede.''' 

Syngynge he was, or flowtinge,^ al the day : 

He was as fressh as is the moneth of May ! 

6 Farthest. ' Cheat and small. 8 See Note 2. 

9 An approach to those. 

^0 A lewd man, i. e. a layman ; very common in Old English. 

11 Unless. 12 The rudiments of whatsoever. 

13 Chide ; familiarly, sntib. 

1* For the occasio^i ; common till long after Shakspeare. 

1 The Knight, described by the poet immediately before. 

2 Curled. 3 j^s ^y, 4 Agile ; a word common in the romances. 
5 Knightly warfare. ^ Embroidered. ' Bed. 8 Fluting. 



THE PERIOD OF MIDDLE ENGLISH. 129 

Schort was his goune, with sleeves long and wyde. 

Wei cowde he sitte on hors, and faire ryde : 

He cowde songes wel make and endyte, 

Justne^ and eek daunce, and wel purtray and write.^*^ 

Curteys he was, lowly, and servysable, 

And carf^^ byforn^^ his fadur^^ at the table. 

8. Our next readings are from the Knight's Tale, the Iliad of 
the middle-age poetry of England. Palamon and Arcite, Grecian 
knights, have been taken prisoners by Theseus, who, as in the Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, is Duke of Athens. .Imprisoned in a tower 
overlooking the palace gardens, they see and fall in love with 
Emilie, the sister of the Amazon queen Hippolyta. Their former 
friendship is now changed into jealousy and hate. Afterwards, the 
one escaping and the other being released, they encounter in a single 
combat, which is related with infinite spirit. Theseus, coming to 
the wood id which they had met, separates them, and proclaims a 
tournament, of which the lady shall be the prize. The passages 
describing the adornment of the lists, and the supernatural agency 
which presides over the strife, are among the most strikingly beau- 
tiful in English poetry. Not less admirable is the touching close. 
A seeming accident, caused by the gods, destroys Arcite ; and he 
dies, after commending Palamon to the favour of his lady. 

The following passages contain the description of May morning 
which precedes the interrupted duel, and a few verses from the last 
words of Arcite. 

The busy larke, messager of daye, 
Salueth^ in hire^ song the morwe^ gray ; 
And fyry Phebus ryseth up so bright. 
That al the orient laugheth of the light ; 
And with his stremes dryeth in the greves^ 
The sUver dropes, hongyng on the leeves. 
And Arcite, that is in the court ry^l^ 
With Theseus, his squyer principal. 



^ Joust: ^ov justen ; perhaps a mis-spelling. 

If* He could both copy manuscripts and illuminate them with paintings. 

" Carved. 12 Before. 13 Father. 

1 To be pronounced in only two syllables. 

2 Pure Anglo-Saxon ; used also by Chaucer for Tieora. See Alfred, Note 11. 
■'' Morn, morrow. 

* Groves ; Anglo-Saxon nearly ; Chaucer has grove also in this passage. 
5 Eoyal ; one of the French words which occur almost in every line. 

f2 



130 • THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Is risen, and loketh^ on the mery day. 
And, for to doon^ his observance to May, 
Eemembryng of the poynt of his desire. 
He on his courser, stertyng as the fire, 
Is riden into feeldes him to pleye. 
Out of the court, were it a myle or tweye. 
And to the grove, of which that I yow^ tolde, 
By aventure his wey he gan to holde ; 
To make him a garland of the greves. 
Were it of woodewynde^ or hawthorn leves. 
And lowde he song agens the sonne scheene :^^ 
" May, with al thyn floures and thy greene. 
Welcome be thou, wel faire freissche May l" 



This al and som, that Arcyte moste^ dye : 
For which he sendeth after Emelye, 
And Palamon, that was his cosyn deere. 
Than seyd he thus, as ye schul^ after heere. 

" Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte 
Declare a poynt of my sorwes^ smerte^ 
To you, my lady, that I love most. 
But I byquethe the service of my gost 
To you aboven every creature ; 
Syn^ that my lyf may no lenger dure.*^ 
Alias, the woo ! ^ Alias, the peynes stronge, 
That I for you have sufired, and so longe ! 
Alias, the deth ! Alias, myn Emelye ! 
Alias, departing^ of om- companye ! 
Alias, myn hertes queen ! Alias, my wyf ! 
Myn hertes lady, ender of my lyf! 
What is this world ? What asken men to have ? 
Now with his love, now in his colde grave 
Allone, withouten eny companye. 
Farwel, my swete ! farwel, myn Emelye ! 



6 Looheth; Anglo-Saxon, locaili. 

■^ Do ; from the Anglo-Saxon don. See Alfred, Note 94. 

8 See Alfred, Note 7. 

9 Woodbine ; Anglo-Saxon, wudu-hind. 

10 Bright, beautiful; very common in Old English; Anglo-Saxon, sciene _ 
German, schon, beautiful ; related to the English shine. 

1 Must. 2 Shall; see Alfred, Note 2. 3 Sorrow's. 

4 A halting line ? ^ Since. ^ See Note 4. '^ Woe. 

8 Parting or disparting. 



THE PERIOD OF MIDDLE ENGLISH. 131 

Forget not Palamon, that gentil man !" 
And with that word his speche faile gan :^ 
For fro^^ his herte up to his brest was come 
The cold of deth, that him had overcome. 
And yet moreover in his armes twoo 
The vital strength is lost, and al agoo.^^ 
Only the intellect, withouten more, 
That dwelled in his herte sik and sore, 
Gan fayle, when the herte felte deth. 
Dusked his eyghen^^ two, and fayled breth. 
But on his lady yit he cast his ye : ^^ 
His laste word was, " Mercy, Emelye !" 

9. Of the Prose of the fourteenth century, a very short specimen 
will suffice. It, too, will be furnished by the Canterbury Tales. It 
is the beginning of the Tale of Melibeus, describing the injury which 
the principal character in the narrative was tempted to avenge. 

" A yong man called Melibeus, mighty and riche, and his wif 
that called was Prudens, had a doughter which that called was 
Sophie. Upon a day byfel, that for his desport he is went into the 
feldes him to play. His wif, and his doughter eek, hath he laft 
withiu his hous. Thre of his olde foos^ han^ it espyed, and setten 
laddres to the walles of his hous; and by the wyndowes ben 
entred, and betyn^ his wif, and woundid his doughter with fyve 
mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places; that is to sajm, in here 
feet, in here hondes, in here eeres, in here nose, and in here mouth ; 
and lafte her for deed, and went away. 

" Whan Melibeus retourned was into his hous, and seigh* al this 
meschief, he, lik a man mad, rendyng his clothes, gan wepe and 
crie. Prudens his wyf, as ferforth as^ sche dorste, bysought him 
of his wepyng to stynte. But not forthi^ he gan to crie ever lenger 
the more. 

* * * * 

" This noble wif Prudens suflfred hir housbonde for to"^ wepe and 
crie, as for a certeyn space ; and, whan she seigh hir tyme, sche 
sayd him in this wise : ' Alias, my lord ! ' quod sche, ' why make ye 
youre self for to be lik a fool ? Forsothe it apperteyneth not to a 
wys man, to make such sorwe.' " 



10 From. ii Gone 

12 Eyes ; Anglo-Saxon, sing, eage ; plur. eagan. ^^ ^g. 

1 Foes. 2 Bave. ^ Beat. * Saw. 

5 SofarforiJi as; a phrase retained in the language, though unusual. 

6 Not therefore^ nevertheless. 

' For to., before infinitive : long retained ; still used vulgarly. 



132 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

10. The poet Lydgate may represent for us the language written 
in the first half of the fifteenth century. Yet, admiringly studious 
of Chaucer, he is in style a little more antique than he should be. 

His story of " The Churl and the Bird" is imitated (he himself 
says, rather too modestly, that it is translated) from a favourite 
French fabliau. It is a moral apologue. A churl or peasant catches 
a bird, which speaks to him, and implores freedom, promising him, 
in return, three golden precepts of wisdom. Released accordingly, 
she flies to her tree, and thence delivers the three lessons: first, 
that he should not be easy of belief in idle tales ; secondly, that he 
should never desire things impossible ; thirdly, that he should never 
gTieve immoderately for that which is irrecoverably lost. Then, 
singing and rejoicing, the bird taunts the man. She tells him that, 
in letting her escape, he had lost wealth which might have ransomed 
a mighty king ; for that there is in her body a magical stone, weigh- 
ing an ounce, which makes its possessor to be always victorious, 
rich, and beloved. The churl laments loudly. The bird, on this, 
reminds him of the three precepts, and says he has already dis- 
obeyed them all. In the first place, he had believed her story about 
the precious stone, which he might have known to be a downright 
fib, if he had had wit enough to recollect, that she had described it 
as weighing an ounce, which was evidently more than the weight 
of her whole body. It is plain how he had broken the second and 
third rules, although the stone had really existed. Nor need we 
follow the poet in his anxious deduction of the moral : it consists in 
the three lessons themselves. 

The following stanzas are somewhat lame in prosody, as is usual 
with Lydgate. They describe the garden, and the bird singing in 
it.* 

Alle the aleis^ were made playne with sond,^ 
The benches turned with newe turvis^ grene ; 

Sote^ herbers,^ withe condite^ at the honde, 
That weUid up agayne the sonne shene, 
Lyke silver stremes as any cristalle clene : 

The burbly^ wawes^ in up boyling, 

Rounde as byralle^ ther beamys out shynynge. 

1 Alleys. 2 jSand ; o for a ; very common. 3 Turfs, turves. 

* Sweet ; sote or soote usually printed in Chaucer. 

5 Arbours. ^ Conduit ; fountain. ' Modern, gurgling. 

' Waves. ® Beryl. 

* Text from Halliwell's " Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate ;" (Percy 
Society;) 1840. 



THE PERIOD OF MIDDLE ENGLISH. 133 

Amyddis the gardeyn stode a fressh lawrer :^^ 
Theron a bird, syngyng bothe day and nyghte, 

With shynnyng fedres brightar than the golde weere ;^^ 
Whiche with hir song made hevy hertes lighte : 
That to beholde it was an hevenly sighte, 

How, toward evyn and in the dawnyng. 

She ded her payne most amourously to synge. 

Esperus^^ enforced hir cor^ge, 

Toward evyn, whan Phebus gan to west, 
And the braunches to hir ^vauntage,^^ 

To syng hir complyn^* and than go to rest : 

And at the rysing of the quene Alcest,^^ 
To synge agajnae, as was hir due, 
Erly on morowe the day-sterre^^ to salue.^"^ 

It was a verray hevenly melodye, 

Evyne and morowe to here the byrddis song, 

And the soote sugred armonye. 

Of uncouthe^^ varblys^^ and tunys drawen on longe, 
That al the gardeyne of the noyse rong : 

Til on a morwe, whan Tytan^^ shone ful clere, 

The birdd was trapped and kaute^^ with a pant^re.^^ 

11. The manner in which English was written during the latter 
half of the fifteenth century has been examined by a very skilful 
analyst ; and his account of it we may profitably adopt, although 
it involves a little anticipation of the period which our literary 
.history will next take up. 

" In following the line of our writers, both in verse and prose, we 
find the old obsolete English to have gone out of use about the 
accession of Edward the Fourth. Lydgate and Bishop Peacock, 
especially the latter, are not easily understood by a reader not 
habituated to their language : he requires a glossary, or must help 
himself out by conjecture. In the Paston Letters, on the contrary, 
in Harding the metrical chronicler, or in Sir John Fortescue's dis- 
course on the difference between an absolute and a limited mon- 
archy, he finds scarce any difiiculty : antiquated words and forms of 

i*^ Laurel ; French. ii Wire. 12 Hesperus^ the evening star. 

13 An obscure line. 

1* Even-song ; the last or completing church-oflRce of the day. 

15 Alcestis ; doubtful mythology. i^ Star. 

1'^ Salute ; see Chaucer. ^ Unhnoton^ unusual, strange. 

19 Warbles, warhlings. 20 Titan, the sun. 21 Caught. 22 Trap. 



134 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

termination frequently occur; but he is hardly sensible that he 
reads these books much less fluently than those of modern times. 
These were written about 1470. 

" But in Sir Thomas More's History of Edward the Fifth, written 
about 1509, or in the beautiful baUad of The Nut-brown Maid, 
which we cannot place very far from the year 1500, there is not 
only a diminution of obsolete phraseology, but a certain modern 
turn and structure, both in the verse and prose, which denotes the 
commencement of a new era, and the establishment of new rules of 
taste in polite literature. Every one will understand, that a broad 
line cannot be traced for the beginning of this change. HaweSj 
though his English is very different from that of Lydgate, seems to 
have had a great veneration for him, and has imitated the manner 
of that school to which, in a marshalling of our poets, he unques- 
tionably belongs. Skelton, on the contrary, though ready enough 
to coin words, has comparatively few that are obsolete."* 

From the part of the fifteenth century whose language has thus 
been described, we may be content with one short specimen of 
familiar Prose. It is taken from a curious collection of Letters and 
other papers, relating to the affairs of a family in Norfolk during 
the latter half of the century. Our extract is from a letter of the 
year 1459, in which the writer speaks of the studies of his brother. 
The old spelling is discarded in our copy ; that the modern cast of 
phrase and arrangement may the more readily be perceived.f 

" Worshipful Sir, and my full special good master, after humble 
recommendation, please it you to understand, that such service as I 
can do to your pleasure, as to mine understanding, I have showed 
my diligence now this short season since your departing. * * 
Item, Sir, I may say to you, that WiUiam hath gone to school, to a 
Lombard called KaroU Giles, to learn and to be read in poetry, or 
else in French. For he hath been with the same Karoll every day 
two times or three, and hath bought divers books of him ; for the 
which, as I suppose, he hath put himself in danger | to the same 
KaroU. I made a motion to William to have known part of his 
business : and he answered and said, that he would be as glad 
and as fain of a good book of French or of poetry, as ray 
master Sir John Fastolf would be to purchase a fair manor : and 
thereby I understand he list not to be communed withal in such 
matters." 



* Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe. 

t The Paston Letters : Knight's edition. 

X In danger, i. e. in debt ; so used by Shakspeare, and later. 



THE SAXON TONGUE IN SCOTLAND. 135 



THE LANGUAGE OF SCOTLAND. 

12. The history of the transformations suffered by the Anglo- 
Saxon tongue is not complete, till we have marked its fate in 
Scotland. 

How a language substantially the same with that of the English 
Teutons came to be currently spoken in the Scottish Lowlands to 
the north of the Frith of Forth, is one of those questions in our 
national annals, to which no answer has been made that is ia any 
view satisfactory. If the old historians have reported to us every 
thing that really happened, the Anglo-Saxon settlements did not 
extend into those provinces, or a very little way, if at all. 

The difficulty is greatest, if we believe that the Picts, who are 
named as their early inhabitants, were a Celtic race. But it is 
not by any means removed by the theory, which has been made 
very probable, that our Pictish ancestors were really Goths. If 
they were so, they must have been separated from the main stock 
at a period so far distant, that it could not but have been difficult 
for their language to pass into any of the Gothic dialects that were 
transported from the continent in the fifth century. One is tempted, 
therefore, to regard with some favour the opinion, that the Danes 
or other Northmen, especially the Norwegians, were the planters 
of a Gothic speech in the north. If their piratical expeditions are 
the only facts to be founded on, the solution is plainly insufficient. 
Such incursions, though leaving a stray colony here and there, 
could not well have changed the language of a whole people. 
Lately, however, the clue to the labyrinth has ingeniously been 
sought in the curious fact, already known but overlooked, that, 
for thirty years in the eleventh century, a Norwegian kingdom was 
actually and regularly maintained in the East of Scotland. The 
Norse population which may be conjectm*ed to have then been 
introduced, is alleged to have been, with the occasional infusions 
of the same blood, the kernel of the race now inhabiting the eastern 
counties northward of the Lothians : and the further assimilation 
to the Germans of the south, in language as well as customs, is 
attributed to the annexation of all these counties to the Scottish 
crown. Here, again, our groundwork of facts is scanty. Nor 
should it be overlooked, that, although the North-Eastern dialects 
of Scotland exhibit many Norse words in their vocabulary, the 
grammar of all of them is as decidedly Anglo-Saxon as that of 
Yorkshire or Norfolk. This fact has greater importance than we 
might at first suppose ; since the Scandinavian tongues have gram- 



136 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

matical peculiarities, distinguishing them clearly from all those of 
the Teutonic stock. 

As to the Lothians and other Scottish provinces lying southward 
of the Forth, no doubt arises. We have learned that they were 
covered by Anglo-Saxon emigrants ; and the descendants of these 
invaders gradually spread themselves towards the west. It was 
only in consequence of political occurrences, and not tiU a consider- 
able time after the invasions, that they were separated J&rom the 
more southerly Teutonic conununities. Further, in the twelfth cen- 
tury and later, the Scottish kings cherished the Saxon institutions 
and habits with constant eagerness. 

The speech of these South-Eastern counties, which became that 
of Scottish literature, was, in its earliest periods, just one of the 
Anglian or Northumbrian varieties of the Anglo-Saxon. It pre- 
served its original character, and underwent changes closely re- 
sembling those which took place in England ; and this fact, by the 
way, is in itself enough to overthrow the old supposition, that the 
Norman Conquest was the cause which destroyed the Anglo-Saxon 
tongue ; since the Normans in the Scottish kingdom were always 
very few, chiefly malcontent barons from the south. In the four- 
teenth century, when the language of Scotland began to be freely 
used in metrical composition, it was not at aU further distant from 
the standard English of the time, than were other English dialects 
which, like the Scottish, were frequently applied to literary uses. 

13. Barbour, contemporary with Chaucer, has already been 
described as having really written in purer English than that 
which was used in the Canterbury Tales. The Scottish poet's 
dialect has its closest parallel (and the resemblance is often striking) 
in the more homely and popular diction of Piers Plowman. The 
provincial spelling is a mere accident, which must not be allowed to 
mislead us. 

We may take, from " The Bruce," the animated panegyric on 
freedom, often though it has been quoted elsewhere.* 

A ! fredome is a noble thing ! 
Fredome mayss^ man to haiff^ liking : 
Fredome all solace to man giffis :^ 
He levys* at ess,^ that frely levys ! 

1 Makes. ^ Have. ^ Gives ; Anglo-Saxon, gifan. 

* Lives; Anglo-Saxon, libban; Danish, leven ; German, leben. 5 JEase. 

* Text from Jamieson's Bruce and Wallace ; 1820„ 



THE SAXON TONGUE IN SCOTLAND. 137 

A noble hart may haiff nane^ ess, 
Na^ ellys^ nocht^ that may him pless,-^^ 
Gyff fredome failyhe : ^^ for fre liking 
Is yharnyt^^ our^^ aU othir thing. 
Na he, that ay hass levyt fre, 
May nocht knaw weill the propyrte, 
The angyr, na the wrechyt dome,^^ 
That is cowplyt^^ to foule thyrldome.^*' 
Bot^^ gyff he had assayit it, 
Than all perquer^^ he suld^^ it wyt ;^^ 
And suld think fredome mar to pryss,^^ 
Than all the gold in warld that is. 
Thus contrar thingis evir mar, 
Discoweryngis off the tothir ar. 
And he that thryll^^ is, has nocht his : 
All that he hass embandownyt^^ is 
Till24 hys lord, quhat^^ evir he be. 
Yheyt^^ hass he nocht sa mekill^'^ fre 
As fre wyll to leyve,^^ or do 
That at^^ hys hart hym drawis to. 

14. The close likeness of the two Tongues did not last very long 
after the War of Independence. Before the end of the fifteenth 
century, the literary language of Scotland, although it continued to 
be called English by those who wrote in it, differed widely from 
that of England, although not so far as to make it difficult of com- 
prehension to an Englishman familiar with Chaucer. 

The deviation is quite established in the poems of Dunbar, and is 
made more palpable by the pedantic Latinisms which, as we have 

6 The a for o, so frequent in the Scottish dialect, is Anglo-Saxon, and, 
as we have seen, lingered long in the English. 

7 Nor. 8 ;Else. ^ Not and nought. See Chaucer's prose. 
10 Please. " Fail. 

12 Yearned, longed for : Anglo-Saxon, geornian, to desire. 

13 Over, above. i* Boom. i^ Coupled. 

16 Thraldom ; Anglo-Saxon, thrcd ; thirlian, to pierce, drill. i'' But. 

18 Perfectly : Scottish ; said to be per-quair, by book : quair is used by 
Chaucer, and gives our quire (of paper). 

19 S- for sell- or sh-, an Anglian peculiarity. 20 Xnow. 21 Prize. 
22 See Note 16. 23 J^andoned ; nearly French. 

24 To; modern Scottish. It is really good Anglo-Saxon, though less 
common than to. 

25 In Old Scottish spelling (and in Mceso- Gothic) quJi- answers to the Anglo- 
Saxon hw-, and the English wih-. 

26 Yet ? 27 Scottish ; much / from the Anglo-Saxon adjective my eel, 
mycle, great ; comparative, mcere ; superlative, mcest. 

28 Live. 29 j^t^ relative, Scottish for that. 



138 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

learned, now infected all the Scottish poetry, coalescing very badly 
with the native Teutonic diction. The striking personifications in 
his masterpiece, " The Daunce," are for several reasons unsuitable 
as specimens. We are partly indemnified by the opening of the 
very beautiful poem, " The Thistle and the Rose," which com- 
memorates, in the allegorical manner of similar poems by Chaucer 
and his French masters, the marriage of James the Fourth with the 
Princess Margaret of England, celebrated in the year 1503.* 

Qulien Merch wes with variand^ windis past. 
And Appryll had, with hir silver schouris, 

Tane leif at^ Nature with ane^ orient blast. 
And lusty^ May, that mudder^ is of flouris, 
Had maid the bhdis to begyn thair houris^ 

Amang the tendir odouris reid^ and quhyt, 

Quhois armony to heir it wes^ delyt ; 

In bed at morrow, sleiping as I lay. 

Me thocht Aurora, with hir cristall ene,^ 

In at the window lukit^^ by the day, 

And halsit^^ me, with visage paill and grene : 
On quhois hand a lark sang fro the splene : ^^ 

" Awalk,^^ luvaris,^* out of your slomering ! ^^ 

Se how the lusty morrow dois up spring ! " 

Me thocht fresche May befoir my bed up stude, 
In weid depaynt of mony diverss hew ; 

Sobu', benyng, and full of mansuetude ; 
In brycht atteir of flouris forgit^^ new, 
Hevinly of colour, quhyt, reid, broun, and blew, — 

Balmit^'^ in dew, and gilt with Phebus bemys ; 

QuhyU^^ aU the house illumynit of hir lemys.^^ 

1 Varying ; the Anglo-Saxon present participle in -nde ; to be found in 
Chaucer. '^ Leave of . ^ ^^. ^jjgjQ.gaxon and Scottish. 

4 From Anglo-Saxon and Old English, lust^ pleasure, desire. 

^ Mother ; Anglo-Saxon, moder, modor, modur. 

6 i. e. Their prayers ; " horae," an ecclesiastical phrase. 

■^ Bed; see Chaucer. 8 Was; Anglo-Saxon, woes. 

^ See Chaucer's Death of Arcite, Note 12. lo Looked. 

^1 Literally, embraced (from hals^ neck) ; thence saluted. 

12 From the spleen^ from the heart. i3 Awake. 

1* Lovers; Anglo-Saxon, lufian, to love. ^^ Slumbering. 

16 Forged, fashioned. ^"^ Embalmed. is While, until. 

1^ Gleams, beams ; Anglo-Saxon, leoma, a beam or ray of light ; leoman, 
to shine or gleam. 

* Text from Laing's " Poems of William Dunbar ;" 1834. 



THE SAXON TONGUE IN SCOTLAND. 139 

" Slugird ! " scho^'^ said, " Awalk arnione^^ for schame, 
And in my honour sum thing thow go wryt : 

The lark hes done the mirry day proclame, 
To raise up luvaris with confort and delyt : 
Yit nocht incressis thy curage^^ to indyt ; 

Quhois hairt sum tyme lies glaid^^ and blisfull bene, 

Sangis to mak undir the levis grene !" 

20 She ; common in England in the fourteenth century. 

21 Anon. 22 Courage : but meaning, as in Lydgate, and often else- 
where, desire. 23 Qlad. 



140 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE SOURCES OF THE MODERN ENGLISH TONGUE; 
AND THEIR COMPARATIVE IMPORTANCE. 

1. Two Points — The Grammar — The Vocabulary — Doctrine as to each. — 
Grammar. 2. English Grammar in Substance Anglo-Saxon — Enumera- 
tion of Particulars. — 3. General Doctrine — Our Deviations in Verbs few 
—The chief of them — Our Deviations in Nouns and their Allies many 
— Description of them — Consequences. — 4. Position of Modern English 
among European Tongues — Leading Facts common to the History of all 
— Comparison of the Gothic Tongues with the Classical — Comparison of 
the English Tongue with both. — Vocabulary. 5. Glossarial Elements 
to be Weighed not Numbered — The Principal Words of the English 
Tongue Anglo-Saxon — Seven Classes of Words from Saxon Roots. — 

6. Words from Latin Roots — Periods of Introduction — Kinds — Uses. — 

7. Words from French Roots — Periods of Introduction — Kinds and Uses. 
— 8. Words from Greek Roots. — 9. Words from Tongues yielding few. 
— 10. Estimate, by Number, of Saxon Words Lost — Remarks. — 11. Esti- 
mate of the Number of Saxon Words Retained — Proportion as tested by the 
Dictionaries — Proportion as tested by Specimens from Popular Writers. 

1. Our hasty survey of the Origin and Progress of the English 
Language has now been carried down to the beginning of the six- 
teenth century. 

Its organization may be held to have been by that time complete. 
The laws determining the changes to be made on words, and regu- 
lating the grammatical structure of sentences, had been definitively 
fixed and were generally obeyed : all that had still to be gauaed 
in this particular was an increase of ease and dexterity in the appli- 
cation of the rules. The vocabulary, doubtless, was not so far 
advanced. It was receiving constant accessions; and the three- 
and-a-half centuries that have since elapsed have increased our 
stock of words immensely. But this is a process which is still 
goiug on, and which never comes to a stop in the speech of any 
people : and, the grammar being once thoroughly founded, the 
effects of glossarial changes are only secondary, untU the time arrives 
when they co-operate with other causes in breaking up a language 
altogether. 



SOURCES OF THE GRAMMAR. 141 

In brief, all the alterations which our tongue has suffered, since 
the end of the middle ages, may be regarded as nothing more than 
changes and developments of Style; that is, as varieties in the 
manner in which individuals express their meaning, all of them 
using the same language. 

Here, therefore, we may endeavour to sum up our results. 

We have no time to spare for eulogies on the English Language. 
It is not only the object of affection to all of us, for the love we 
bear to our homes and our native land, and for the boundless 
wealth of pleasant associations awakened by its familiar sounds. 
It is worthy, by its remarkable combination of strength, precision, 
and copiousness, of being, as it already is, spoken by many millions, 
and these the part of the human race that appear likely to control, 
more than any others, the future destinies of the world. It may 
also be remarked, that the very nature of our tongue, the position 
it occupies between the Teutonic languages and those of Roman 
origin, fits it especially for the mighty functions which press more 
and more upon it.* 

Again, it is not our part to determine, with* the accuracy of 
philosophical grammar, the character of our language, or the prin- 
ciples which dictate its laws. 

Our investigation is strictly Historical : and it will be closed when 
we have obtained a general view of the relations which the Modem 
English bears to those other tongues, from which it derives its laws 
and its materials. 

The leading doctrines may be asserted in two or three sentences. 

First, our Grammar, the system of laws constituting our Etymol- 
ogy and Syntax, is Anglo-Saxon in aU its distinctive characteristics. 

Secondly, our Dictionary, though we take it in its latest and 
fullest state, derives a very large proportion of its words from the 
Anglo-Saxon. The only other tongues to which it owes much are 
those of the Classical stock : the French and Latin furnishing a 
very great number of words ; and the Greek giving to our ordinary 
speech hardly any thing directly, though much through the Latin. 

These two points, the Grammatical and the Glossarial character 
of the English language, will now successively be glanced at. 

THE GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

2. In regard to our Grammar, so many facts have gathered about 

* "It is calculated that, before the lapse of the present century, a time 
that so many now alive will live to witness, English will be the native and 
vernacular language of about one hundred and fifty millions of human 
beings." Watts : in Latham's " English Language; " Ed. 1850. 



142 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

US in the course of our historical inquiry, that little is now left to 
be done except the generalizing of particulars. 

" Our chief peculiarities of structure and of idiom are essentially 
Anglo-Saxon ; while almost all the classes of words, which it is the 
office of grammar to investigate, are derived from that language. 
Thus, the few inflections we have are all Anglo-Saxon. The 
English genitive, the general modes of forming the plural of nouns, 
and the terminations by which we express the comparative and 
superlative of adjectives; (-er and -est;) the inflections of the 
pronouns ; those of the second and third persons, present and im- 
perfect, of the verbs ; the inflections of the preterites and participles 
of the verbs, whether regula,r or irregular ; and the most frequent ter- 
mination of our adverbs (ly) : are all Anglo-Saxon. The nouns, too, 
derived from Latin and Greek, receive the Anglo-Saxon termina- 
tions of the genitive and plural ; while the preterites and participles 
of verbs derived from the same sources, take the Anglo-Saxon 
inflections. As to the parts of speech, those which occur most 
frequently, and are individually of most importance, are almost 
wholly Saxon. Such are our articles and definitives generally, as 
' a, an, the, this, that, these, those, many, few, some, one, none ; ' 
the adjectives whose comparatives and superlatives are irregularly 
formed ; the separate words ' more ' and ' most,' by which we 
express comparison as often as by distinct terminations; all our 
pronouns, personal, possessive, relative, and interrogative ; nearly 
every one of om- so-called irregular verbs, including all the auxili- 
aries, ' have, be, shall, will, may, can, must,' by which we express 
the force of the principal varieties of mood and tense; all the 
adverbs most frequently employed ; and the prepositions and con- 
junctions almost -without exception."* 

3. The valuable enumeration which we have thus received, 
admits of being reduced to a very short formula. In no point of 
importance is the Grammar of the English Language any thing 
more than a simplification of the Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon. 

Our Etymology is simpler than that of our mother-tongue, in 
proportion to the extent to which we have carried our abandon- 
ment of its inflections. We have stripped our words to the bones, 
leaving little more than their root-forms, and making ourselves 
dependent on auxiliary words for denoting their relations. This ■ 
process indeed has gone so far, as to make our Syntax nearly a 
nonentity. 

But here, again, a distinction should be taken. We have not 
dropped the inflections alike in all classes of words. The inflected 
* Edinburgh Eeview ; Vol. LXX ; 1839. 



SOURCES OF THE GRAMMAR. 143 

words were, the verbs on the one hand, the nouns, pronouns, and 
articles on the other. On the former we have made comparatively- 
little change: the latter we have metamorphosed almost com- 
pletely. 

In respect of our Verbs, then, we are still in substance Anglo- 
Saxon. The alterations we have made, so far as worth notice, are 
these. On the one hand, we have, it is true, retained the -st and 
-th of the second and third persons singular in the present, and the 
-st of the second person in the preterite; but the -th is nearly 
displaced by the -s or -es of the Northumbrian Saxon, and the 
second person singular by the second plural. On the other hand, 
in the way of abandoning old forms entirely, we have made changes 
of which three only here require notice. One of these seems to 
have been harmless ; namely, the dropping of a difficult gerundive 
form, importing obligation. The two other changes have been seri- 
ously hurtful. First, the verb Weorthan, "to become," did the 
work of an auxiliary to the passive voice, much as the German, 
Werden. With the passive participle, it made a proper present 
tense ; Beon, or Wesan, To be, taking its place in the perfect and 
past. Thus, "Domus sedificatur," "Domus sedificata est," and 
" Domus sedificata fuit," had each its ready and idiomatic version. 
The useful verb Weorthan was preserved in Scotland till the six- 
teenth century, or longer. But in England it vanished much 
earher ; and we have not yet been ingenious enough to discover 
any efficient substitute for it. We shall, indeed, seldom if ever be 
misunderstood, if we are content to say, in a passive sense, " the 
house is building : " and a genuine ancient prefix gives us a phrase 
quite unequivocal, in " the house is a-building." But those forms 
have not found favour in the eyes of our most authoritative gram- 
marians : and punctiliously correct speakers insist on using a cum- 
brous circumlocution, or compounding an awkward and novel auxi- 
liary.* Secondly, the Anglo-Saxon had past tenses for the verbs 
Mot and Sceal, now represented by the defective auxiliaries Must 
and Ought. Our loss of these preterites forces us, when we wish 
to express past obligation by these words, to adopt the expedient 
of throwing the main verb into the past. We interpret such phrases 
correctly by common consent : but they really misrepresent the re- 
lations of the two verbs in point of time. " He ought to have 
written " is a false translation of " Debuit scribere ; " although. 



* Weorthan is used both by Barbour and Gawain Douglas. The uncouth 
" is being" is not quite of yesterday: it is introduced, with a sneer, in 
Horace Walpole's Correspondence. 



144 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

if we are to use this auxiliaiy, it is the only translation that our 
language enables us to give. 

The only noticeable form which we have added to our hereditary 
verbs is this. Our ancestors long ago became dissatisfied with the 
Saxon manner (certainly a rude one) of denoting futurity. It was 
usually attempted by the tense which we call the present, but which 
our Anglo-Saxon grammars correctly regard as an indefinite. Pre- 
cision was sought by new applications of the auxiliaries Sceal and 
Wille, properly expressive of obligation and resolution : and these 
grew up into our Shall and Will, the shibboleth which betrays 
Irishmen and Scotsmen. The modem distiactions between them 
not only were unknown to the countrymen of Alfred, but are 
at variance with the applications of similar words now made both 
in the Gothic tongues and in the French and Italian : and none of 
our etymologers has yet been able to reconcile them under any one 
consistent principle. 

Now, however, we must consider the Nouns, (substantive and 
adjective,) and the words allied to them. Here our innovations 
have been prodigious : we have, in fact, revolutionized the whole 
system. Except for the pronouns, the only inflections we have 
retained are two. We have, in substantives, the plui-al fonns, 
which, as has been seen, are corruptions from one of several 
Anglo-Saxon declensions. We have also the genitive or pos- 
sessive: but this case itself, partly superseded by the preposi- 
tion from the earliest stages of English, has had its application 
restricted stUl further by modern usage. Though we may say 
" man's" and " men's," we now use, by far oftenest, the compound 
forms " of man" and " of men:" and, ia very many instances, Ave 
cannot do otherwise without introducing awkwardness or confusion. 
In adjectives, again, as the extracts have shown, we not only lost 
very early the fine distinction between definites and indefinites, but 
made the words totally indecliaable. Further, we have dropped all 
the various and convenient inflections of the articles. 

These innovations on the nouns and their aUies afiect the struc- 
ture of every sentence we utter. They involve these two serious 
consequences. Modern English words admit very little Inversion 
(whence mainly comes the bareness of our Syntax) : they have a 
great and troublesome inaptitude of Composition. 

The effect of these two philological infirmities wall be better un- 
derstood, if we take advantage of the position we have reached, 
for comparing, in the leading points, the history of our own language 
with that of others which are now spoken abroad. 

4. We have to learn, in the first place, a doctrine maintained by 



SOURCES OF THE GRAMMAS. 145 

all our most pMlosophical philologers ; a doctrine which they do 
not seek to apply to language in its primitive stage, but which 
seems to hold in regard to all Tongues after they have undergone 
considerable development. All such tongues appear, successively, 
in two very dissimilar forms. In the first of these, which is the 
more complex, they are highly inflectional : and, in the second, they 
gradually become less so. The discarding of inflections, and the in- 
troduction of the new modes of expression Avhich it makes neces- 
sary, are steps which take place in the history of all living tongues. 

What the circumstances are that enforce or encourage the me- 
tamorphosis, is a question which no one has convincingly answered. 
In particular, it remains open for scrutiny in our own national 
history : in these elementary inquiries we have made no attempt to 
speculate on it. But we have silently discarded the old notion, 
according to which the English language was regarded as the fruit 
of a compromise between the Saxons and the Normans ; as being orig- 
inally, in fact, a kind of mongrel gibberish, like the lingua franca 
which, in the times of the crusades, passed to and fro between 
the Europeans and the Saracens. Yet there does seem to be some 
reason for doubting whether om* philological antiquaries do not at 
present go too far, when they assert that, on ourgranunar, the Nor- 
man French had no influence whatever. 

Secondly : It is to be noted, that every one of the Modern Euro- 
pean Languages has been formed chiefly by this very method, of 
dropping inflections and finding substitutes. This is, especially, the 
characteristic change which has transformed the Latin into the 
Itahan, French, and Spanish. It is in the same way that the Ger- 
man, Dutch, and Scanduiavian tongues now spoken, have grown 
up from theh Gothic roots. 

TMrdly : All the Modem Gothic Tongues deviate less widely from 
theh origiuals, than do the Modem Classical Tongues from the Latin. 
The gi-eat cause of difference lies ui the Verbs. In the Latin verb, 
the active voice is wholly inflected, the passive partly so : in its 
descendants, the auxiliary forms have intruded far into the former, 
and taken complete possession of the latter. But, in aU the Old 
Gothic Tongues, (the Anglo-Saxon included,) the disentanglement 
had; at the most remote date of our acquaintance with them, gone 
through some of the stages which the Latin of the Eoman Empire 
had still to undergo. The Gothic verbs of all the dialects had 
already assumed most of the auxiliaries which they now have ; be- 
ing, in particular, (except in the old Icelandic,) entirely dependent 
on them for the formation of then- passives. 

Fourthly : While Englishmen have dealt with the verb much in the 

G 



146 • THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

same way as their kindred on the continent, they stand very differ- 
ently in regard to the Nouns and Articles. The Modem Continental 
Languages of the Teutonic stock retain, in one shape or another, the 
inflected forms, which, as was lately noted, our Language has dropped ; 
and they have retained with them the old susceptibility of inversion 
and composition. These differences are, in themselves, sufficient to 
give to the English a structural character very unhke that of such 
tongues as the German. Through them, indeed, we are, even in 
respect of the structure of our sentences, less purely Gothic than 
any other modern Goths. We bear, by means of them, no incon- 
siderable resemblance to the French. They cause us, in short, to 
occupy among the nations of Europe a philological station which is 
somewhat anomalous. 

Fifthly : We are brought still nearer to our nearest continental 
neighbours, by the large amount of our Glossarial borrowings from 
the French and Latin. Nor is it unworthy of remark that these im- 
portations have, in all likelihood, acted reflexly on our Grammatical 
Structure. Our acquisitions in diction are foreign, both in place 
and in pedigree. If they had come from any tongue belonging to 
our own Gothic stock, not only would our speech have been more 
harmonious in character ; but it would not improbably have been 
also more flexible in use, especially in respect of compounding, than 
it can be with words so distmctly alien in origin as are the Latin and 
French. No other European race has made similar appropriations, 
to an extent at all parallel to ours. The Spaniards seem to stand 
next to us, but are very far distant. 

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

5. The Dictionary of the English Language will now be opened. 
We must learn, more precisely than we have hitherto been able to 
do, the character and origin of the words it contains. 

Our task would soon be over, if we were to be content with know- 
ing how many of our words are Anglo-Saxon, and how many come 
from foreign roots. But the question of Number, although we will 
put it by and by, is really more curious than useful. The answer 
to it tends, indeed, to deceive us as to the comparative value belong- 
ing to the several elements of a language. Words which are very 
numerous in the dictionary, may be of secondary consequence, and 
occur infrequently : words which are much fewer may be so essen- 
tial to ordinary communication, as to be coming up incessantly. 

The extent to which a tongue really depends on its various roots, 
is known only when we have discovered, what the Classes of Words 



SOURCES OF THE VOCABULARY. 147 

are that each has furnished. The roots are important, in the 
ratio of the importance which belongs to the classes of words arising 
out of them. 

When our vocabulary is scrutinized in this way, its obligations to 
the Anglo-Saxon appear in a much more striking light, than that 
which they wear when we look only to the proportional numbers, 
large as we shall find that proportion to be. 

Let us see, then, in entering on this inquiry, what kinds of words 
we derive from our Mother-Tongue. 

First : We have from it almost all those words, and parts of words, 
which import Relations. This is merely repeating in another shape 
the assertion already made, that our grammatical forms and idioms 
are Anglo-Saxon : the vocabulary and the grammar react on each 
other. The fact, that our words of this class are chiefly Teutonic, 
cannot be too earnestly impressed on us. It is the most widely- 
reaching of all the circumstances affecting the character of our 
speech :at does more than any thing else in making the Teutonic to 
be the preponderating element. 

Secondly : We owe to the same source not only, as has been seen 
already, all the adjectives, but also all the other words, both nouns 
and verbs, which the grammarians are accustomed to call Irregular. 
Such words are in all languages veiy old, indeed among the very 
oldest : they express ideas which occur to all of us continually in 
the business of life ; and, for these reasons, they are oftener in our 
mouths than any others of their class. This fact, again, brings up 
Anglo-Saxon words continually. 

Thirdly : The Saxon gives us in most instances our only names, 
and in all instances the names that are aptest and suggest them- 
selves most readily, for the greater number of the Objects Perceived 
through the Senses, and for all of them that are most impressive 
and of the greatest consequence to us. Such are the most striking 
things which we see ; as, sun, moon, and stars, land and water, wood 
and stream, hill and dale : to which may be added the most common 
animals and plants. Such are the great changes which take place 
in nature, and the causes of the changes ; as the divisions of time 
(all except autumn*) ; with light and darkness, heat and cold, rain 
and snow, thunder and lightning ; and also the sounds, and postures, 
and motions of animal life. Here is another class of words remark- 
ably numerous : and it is a class peculiarly energetic and vivid in 
impression. 

Fourthly : Although we usually borrow from Latin or French 

* We have the Anglo-Saxon in harvest, which meant the season as well 
as the work. 



148 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

such words as involve a wide abstraction, and are very exten- 
sive and general in meaning, yet those whose Signification is Specific 
are, with few exceptions, Anglo-Saxon. We use a foreign term 
naturalized, when we speak of colour universally : but we faU back 
on our home stores, if we have to tell what the colom- is, calling it 
red, yeUow, or blue, white or black, green or brown. Thus, also, 
we are Eomans when we speak, in a general way, of moving : but 
we are Teutons if we leap or spring, if we stagger, slip, slide, glide, 
or fall, if we walk or run, swim or ride, if we creep, crawl, or fly. 
Now, not only are such precise words by far the most frequent : 
it is also a law of style, that, by how much a term is more specific, 
by so much is it the more animated and suggestive. 

Fifthly : We possess, without going abroad to seek for them, a 
rich fund of apt expressions for the ordinary kinds of Feeling and 
Afifection, for the outward signs of these, for the persons who are 
the earliest and most natural objects of our attachment, and for 
those inanimate things whose names are figuratively significant of 
domestic union. Of this class are love and hate, hope and fear, 
gladness and sorrow; such are the smile and tear, the sigh and 
groan, weeping and laughter ; such are father and mother, man and 
■wife, child, son and daughter, kindred and friends ; such are home, 
hearth, roof, fireside. These are instances of a multitude of words, 
which, even when they are not the only names for the things, are 
the first we learn to give to them. Therefore they not only occm^ 
to us more readily than others, but have the power, through asso- 
ciation, of recalling a host of the most touching images and emotions. 

Sixthly : " The Anglo-Saxon is, for the most part, the language of 
Business ; of the counting-house, the shop, the market, the street, 
the farm." Among an eminently practical people, it is eminently 
the organ of practical action : it retams this prerogative, in defiance 
alike of the necessary innovations caused by scientific d^covery, 
and of the corruptions smuggled in by ignorant and mercenary 
affectation. 

Seventhly: " A very large proportion (and that always the 
strongest) of the language of Invective, humour, sathe, and collo- 
quial pleasantry, is Anglo-Saxon." * 

It must surely be evident, that the Teutonic elements of our 

* The whole substance of this section is borrowed from an essay aheady 
cited ; Edinburgh Review, Vol. LXX ; 1839. To the seven classes of words 
which it has suggested, there may be added one other at least. It consists 
of those idiomatic phrases, and words, and parts of words, which are con- 
demned in most of our current books on style, because they are not imder- 
stood : but which are genuine fragments of our ancient tongue, and abound 
in pith and expressiveness. 



SOURCES OF THE VOCABULARY. 149 

vocabulary are equally valuable in enabling us to speak and write 
perspicuously, and to speak and write with animation ; in making 
what we say easy to be understood, and in making it impressive 
and persuasive. Our mother-tongue, besides dictating the laws by 
which our words are comiected, and furnishing the cement which 
binds them together, yields all our aptest means of describing ima- 
gination, feeling, and every-day facts of life. 

6. Next in the order of importance, and incalculably more exten- 
sive than all borrowings to be afterwards examined, stand those 
parts of our vocabulary which we take from the French and Latin. 

The former tongue being itself the offspring of the latter, it is 
often difficult for us to know which of the two has been our imme- 
diate source. Many of our words exist in an ambiguous form, which 
does not determine the question : and some we have in two shapes, 
as if they had been imported twice over. 

The parent may first be looked at ; since our obligations to her 
began earliest. From the Latin we have borrowed more or less 
for two thousand years, and freely for more than six centuries. 

The first period was the Eoman, to which we are but little 
indebted. It left a very few military terms, one or two of which 
have remained independent, while others have been incorporated in 
names of places. Examples, perhaps the only ones, are Street, the 
syllable Coin (from Colonia) in names like Colne and Lincoln, and 
Chester (from Castrum) alone or as part of a word. 

Next, in the Anglo-Saxon period, the learning of the churchmen 
brought in a considerable number of terms, chiefly ecclesiastical. 
Such words, still in use, are monk, bishop, samt ; minster, porch, 
cloister ; mass, psalter, epistle ; pall, chalice, and candle. 

With the period after the Conquest, begins our difficulty in dis- 
tinguishing our words of Latin origin from those of French. Im- 
portations which are plainly of the former kind make up nearly our 
whole nomenclatm-e in theology and mental philosophy ; while our 
most modern additions of the sort have embraced many miscellane- 
ous terms. Our Latinisms have chiefly arisen in three epochs. 
The first was the thirteenth century, which, as we have seen, 
followed an age devoted to classical studies. Both its theological 
writers and its poets coined freely in the Eoman mint. The second 
period was that which is loosely spoken of as the Elizabethan, 
beginning with the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and 
extending yet farther into the next. In this age, during the enthusiasm 
of a new revival of admiration for antiquity, the privilege of natu- 
ralization was used, chiefly by its latest prose writers, to an extent 



150 THE MODEKN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

which threatened serious danger to purity and ease of speech.* 
Thirdly came the latter part of the eighteenth century, the time 
when Johnson was the dictator of prose style. The pompous 
rotundity then prevalent has been permanently injurious. The 
number of new Latin words it has directly bequeathed to us, is 
reaUy far from being large. But those it has given have come into 
very common use, instead of old Saxon words supposed to be less 
dignified: some of the words which were at first remonstrated 
against, are now heard in our most familiar sentences. Besides this, 
our ordinary forms of speech have received a Latin cast, quite alien 
from the old idiom ; and the tendency seems to have been in no 
way diminished by the revived study of our early literature. 

Our Latin words have done us, on the whole, very much more 
good than harm. 

They go greatly farther than those from the French, towards 
making up for the laming which the tongue had suffered through 
the retrenchment of its power of composition. 

A large proportion of them are expressive of complex ideas, each 
of whose elements might be separately expressed by Teutonic words 
still retained, and the union of which is still so expressed in the 
other languages of the same stock. Many such words were imper- 
atively needed, after our speech had acquired even that degree of 
rigidity which had infected it so early as the thirteenth century. 
But it seems plain, that the ease with which the Latin, after it had 
begun to be decently understood by literary men, was found to 
furnish substitutes for the native compounds, must have tended 
much to discourage even that limited use of compounding, which 
might have been practised till the fifteenth or sixteenth century. 

Many Latin words, too, have been introduced without such 
necessity, yet not without advantage. To those whoHrode the 
most thorny and obscure paths of thought, they often gave apt 
means of expressing nice distinctions ; and the poets reaped from 
them, though usually by a sacrifice of suggestiveness, increased 
roundness and variety both in melody and in phrase. 

7. Our French words now present themselves. Though much 
communication with France took place in the last of the Anglo- 
Saxon centuries, there is no surviving evidence of borrowings from 
its speech till after the Conquest. 

The first stage, then, is that in which, the people and the few 

* Shakspeare marked the Latinisms in their earliest stage, and repeatedly 
ridiculed them. Desolation, Kemuneration, and Accommodate, are among 
those which he puts into the mouths of persons who do not understand them. 



SOURCES OF THE VOCABULARY. 151 

instructed men being alike averse, the Norman French was intro- 
duced by the hand of power. Much of it must have been learned, 
in the course of two or three generations, even by reluctant and 
harshly used vassals ; and many of its terms have retained a place 
which they must have gained very early. It furnished many law- 
phrases, which, oftenest continuing unchanged in form, and never 
going out beyond the precmcts of the courts, need not be reckoned 
at all. But a very large number of words found their way, neces- 
sarily and not very slowly, into common conversation. The state 
of the laws, and of the political constitution, made it imperative that 
those words should be understood and used, which expressed private 
rights and the duties of individuals to the public, as well as all the 
relations between the sovereign power and the people. Feudahsm, 
again, made the commons but too familiar with the whole array of 
phrases designating the rules and apparatus of the system. 

In a second stage, the foreign words were sown rather more 
thickly. It began with the time, whenever that may have been, 
when the few native Englishmen who loved letters entered on 
the study of the French poetry. This cannot possibly have been 
so much as a hundred years after the Conquest; although our 
extant remains of attempts at translations from the French do not 
carry us back nearly so far. 

Still there was nothing more than a beginning, till we reach the 
fourteenth century, when the third era of our Gallicisms may be 
held to open. Two causes then concurred in bringing about a great 
change. The English language was now spoken by all classes of 
society ; and, in 1362, its ascendency was admitted by the laws, 
the native speech being introduced into the pleadings of the 
courts. The French tastes of the nobles cannot, as a critic has re- 
marked, have failed to contribute to the introduction of foreign 
words. These were still farther encouraged by the zeal with which, 
as we have already learned, Chaucer and other men of letters studied 
the poetry of France. Accordingly there now rose that tide of 
French diction, which, with many eddies and some checks, flowed 
on till the close of the middle ages. By that time the new words 
had become so numerous, and were so strongly ingTafted on the 
native stock, and the tongue had undergone so thoroughly the 
change of character which they imposed, that all subsequent 
additions are historically unimportant. 

Yet it should be noted, that many words of French extraction 
have in modern times acquired a right of citizenship among us, 
influencing the turn of style to no small degree, in the periods when 
they have been most in favour. We shaU leara, soon, to look for 



152 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

such words especially in the latter half of the seventeenth century, 
through the literary taste which was then predominant. 

The words which we have taken from the French serve, in great 
part, the same uses as those which have come to us immediately 
from the Latin originals. A great many of our general and abstract 
terms are to be found among them. Only, it may pretty safely be 
asserted, those which belong to this class enter much less into the 
nomenclature of serious and philosophical thought, than those which 
the Roman tongue has directly bestowed. They are, with few ex - 
ceptions, conversant with the ideas and feelings of actual and every- 
day life : and the fact points out the channels through which they 
have reached us. Those that have come through books, have been 
introduced in the lighter departments of our literature : a vast 
number are such as found their way widely over Europe, in the 
times when France was, as she has been so often and so long, the 
social guide and model of Christendom. 

Many other French words serve purposes of their own, which 
could not have been attained either by the native words or by the 
Latin. The mere possession of an ample supply of terms nearly 
synonymous, is, for many kinds of literary communication, an im- 
mense benefit in itself. Often, too, the relics of our Teutonic 
tongue that have descended to us, would not enable us to express 
at all, and our Latiuisms would convey but very clumsily, slight 
distinctions and shades of thought : and still oftener would this take 
place with minute varieties of feeling and sentiment. We gam 
a great deal, in such cases, by that union of precision with delicacy 
which marks the French language. Not seldom, again, we desire 
to express our meaning with reserve, as on occasions when the 
giving of offence is dreaded : and here, on the one side, our native 
phrases would be too energetic and too suggestive ; whUe, on the 
other, the foreign ones are preferable, both as being poorer in 
associations, and on account of their own character. 

8. The Greek has perhaps received more than justice, in being 
named at all, even as the last, among those languages which have 
contributed largely to our dictionary. 

It would not deserve to be so ranked, if we were to have regard 
only to the dialect of common life. In it the only words of Greek 
origin are one or two, which have come to us after having been 
adapted and disguised elsewhere. In this predicament is the word 
Church.* 

Again, though our theological, philosophical, and scientific- no- 

* Anglo-Saxon, Circ: Danish, Kirhe: Scottish, Kirh: contracted from 
the Greek Kyriake^ The Lord's (House). 



SOURCES OF THE VOCABULARY. 153 

menclature comprehends a large number of words originally Greek, 
almost all of these have come to us, since the revival of learning, 
through the Latin. If we note a very few words like Phenomenon 
and Criterion, which retain their Hellenic form, there is hardly, 
perhaps, any other certain instance of a direct derivation of such 
terms, till within the last two or three generations. In this period, 
however, the terminology in several branches of physical science 
has been fitted to the improved state of knowledge, by the com- 
bination of Greek roots into words entirely new. In this process, 
not always very skilfully performed, a large part has been borne 
by scientific discoverers belonging to our country. 

9. There remain for consideration only some borrowings, which 
are so few and of so little consequence, that they might, with 
small loss of knowledge, be altogether overlooked. 

First appears the oldest of our philological benefactors, the Celtic 
tongue in both of its native branches. From these we retain a 
large number of geographical names, oftenest denoting mountains, 
rivers, valleys, and other objects physically distinguishable. More 
recently we have received from the antiquaries a few miscellaneous 
words, such as Bard and Druid ; while Tartan, Plaid, Flannel, and 
others, have owed their introduction to ordinary occasions. But, 
in making this low estimate of the obligations which the English 
owes to the Celtic dialects, we are overlooking the probability that 
the Anglo-Saxons themselves borrowed a great many words from 
their Cymrian subjects. Such words were especially likely to find 
their way into the speech of the Mercian Saxons : and a consider- 
able number of terms, in very frequent use, which are not Saxon 
and may be French, have more plausibly been held to be "Welsh, 
and to have been introduced in this way.* 

Secondly : Whatever we may believe as to the extent of the influ- 
ence exercised by the Danes or Norwegians on any of the pro- 
vincial dialects, it is certain that the Northmen of both races have 
left us a large number of local names, extending over the whole 
ground of their settlements. The most frequent is the word By, 
" a town," in such names as that of Grimsby, a place whose origin 
we formerly found to be sought in a Danish legend. Wich or 
Wic, the same in meaning, is likewise Scandinavian. The word 
Hustings, and two or three others, are said to be Danish. 

Thirdly : Many foreign languages have contributed, especially in 
modern times, to make up for us a considerable stock of exotics. 
Those of each group relate to the history, institutions, or geography, 
of the country whence they come ; and, while it was formerly the 

* Gamett : in the Transactions of the Philological Society ; vol. i. : 1844. 

g2 



154 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

fashion among literary men to attempt giving them a native dress, 
the inclination at present is to leave them unaltered. The matter 
is too trifling to justify many examples. From Spain and Portugal 
we have, with change, the names of two kinds of wine : the Persic 
furnishes the word Turban, and the Arabic (from its learning in the 
middle ages) such scientific terms as Algebra, alkah, alembic, be- 
sides a few names of social distinctions. Of late, also, there have been 
a good many convenient importations from the native tongues of 
India, and some undesirable ones from the provinciahsms of our 
kmsmen in the United States. 

10. It has already been observed, that the Numerical Propor- 
tion of words, considered without regard to then- kinds, is a very 
unsafe test of the comparative importance of the elements consti- 
tuting a language. But, as a matter of curiosity, it may justify a 
little inquiry, limited strictly to our mother-tongue. 

Two questions occur. What proportion of the Anglo-Saxon 
words have we lost ? What proportion to the bulk of Modern 
English is borne by the Anglo-Saxon words which we have in sub- 
stance retained? 

In answer to the first query, it has been said, on a calculation 
somewhat rough, that, of the words constituting the language used 
in Alfred's time, we have dropped about one-fifth. Bosworth's 
Anglo-Saxon Dictionary containing from twenty-six to twenty- 
eight thousand words, between five and six thousand of these are 
obsolete.* 

The Extinct portion contains many Uncompounded Words, whose 
place is supplied from other quarters. But its numbers are swelled 
by a huge mass of lost Compounds, a fact which it is interesting to re- 
mark, though not, at all points, very easy to account for. It shows 
that the new language, besides speedily acquiring an inaptitude to 
the making of compounds for itself, gave up very many of those 
which it inherited from its parent. 

Most of the obsolete compounds are embraced in two classes. 

The first consists of Verbs formed by prefixing prepositions or 
adverbs to the radical word. Thus the old representatives of our 
words " Come " and Go," brought with them many such words as 
these : To out-come and out-go ; to in-come and in-go ; to up-come 
and up-go ; to off-come and off-go ; to before-come and before-go. 
Nearly aU such old compounds of these two words are out of use, 
and have their places filled by words from the French : while, of the 
few which we stiU have, there is probably not one that is used 
otherwise than figuratively. 

* Edinburgh Review, as before cited. 



SOURCES OF THE VOCABULARY. 155 

The second class of compounds (in which, by the way, the modern 
German is ponderously prolific) united two Substantives, the former 
of which took an adjectival or genitival meaning. Instances still sur- 
viving are such terms as these : Thundercloud, thunderstorm, earth- 
quake, swordbearer. Our vocabulary of art and science has been 
greatly affected by our abandonment of one group of such words, 
formed from the Anglo-Saxon name for Art, which is the parent 
of our modern Craft. Examples are furnished by terms which, 
in modern English, would be represented by the following : Song- 
craft, book-craft, star-craft, number-craft, leech-craft. These we 
have Latinized into Poetry, literature, astronomy, arithmetic, and 
medicine : and we have named from the same source all the rest of 
our most ambitious pursuits. Of the ancient family once so flour- 
ishing, the sole survivors are Handicraft and Witchcraft ; names 
which were borne up through all the storms of the middle ages 
by the unceasing interest taken in the things they denote.* 

11. The answer to our second query, which relates to the Pro- 
portion of Saxon Words Retained in our language, may be sought 
by two methods. 

The one leads us to the Dictionaries of Modern English. They 
are said to contain about thirty-eight thousand words, derivatives 
and compounds included. Of these, we are told, about twenty- 
three thousand come from the Anglo-Saxon, which thus yields a 
little less than five-eighths of the whole number. 

The other test has been applied to the proportions in this way. 
Passages have been analyzed, from the authorized version of the 
Scriptures, and from fom-teen popular writers, both in prose and 
verse, of whom the poet Spenser is the earliest, and Samuel Johnson 
the latest. Of the whole number of words examined, those that are 
not of Saxon origin make less than one-fifth, leaving more than four- 
fifths as native. The proportions in the several cases vary widely. 
The translators of the Bible are by far the purest. An extract from 
the book of Genesis has, of foreign words, one twenty-sixth ; and 
another from the Gospel of Saint John has one thirty-seventh ; the 
average of the two being one twenty-ninth. Among the other 
writers, the extreme places are held by Dean Swift, whose foreign 



* Woodcraft, if the word is now alive at all, is so only after having been 
disinterred by Sir Walter Scott. It was not used by the Anglo-Saxons ; 
because they had not, till the Norman times, the thing it signifies. Nor do 
they seem to have had the word Priestcraft. Saint Dunstan might have 
given occasion for it ; but among the Saxon clergy we read of very few 
Dunstans. 



156 THE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

words amount to fewer than one-ninth ; and Gibbon, the historian, 
who has considerably more than one-third.* 

This somewhat whimsical investigation is not worth prosecuting 
into our own century. To be really useful, for so much as the 
groundwork of a general classification of the words in the language, 
the examples would have to be both copious and many, and the 
topics treated in the extracts should be very various. As a crite- 
rion by which to judge of an author's style, such an analysis is, 'for 
many reasons, useless in all cases except such as present extreme 
peculiarities. 

* The particulars may be amusing ; though they will perhaps confirm the 
opinion expressed in the text, that style cannot fairly be tried hj such a 
standard. The whole number of words is 1696, of which the foreign ones 
are 303. The writers stand thus, in the order of their proportional purity : 
Translators of Bible, having foreign words, J^ ; Swift, less than ^ ; Cowley, 
less than \ ; Shakspeare, less than J ; Milton, full ^ ; Spenser, Addison, and 
the poet Thomson, less than i ; Locke and Young, full | ; Johnson, full i ; 
Eobertson the historian, less than J ; Pope, J ; Hume the historian, full | ; 
Gribbon, much more than J. — The passages examined will be found in 
Turner's Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. (ed. 1836) ; the words were counted by the 
Edinburgh Eeviewer before cited ; and the proportions have noAv been 
reckoned in detail. 



PAKT THIED. 

THE LITERATURE OF MODERN TIMES. 
A. D. 1509— A. D. 1852. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE AGE OF THE PEOTESTANT EEFORMATION. 

A. D. 1509— A. D. 1558. 

Henry YIIL, 1509-1547. 

Edward YI., 1547-1553. 

Mary, 1553-1558. 

SECTION FIRST : SCHOLASTIC AND ECCLESIASTICAL LITERATURE 
IN ENGLAND. 

IxTKODUCTiON. 1. Impulses affecting Literature — Checks impeding it — 
The Eeformation — State Affairs — Classical Learning. 2. Influence of the 
Age on the Literature of the Next — Its Social Importance. Classical 
LEAENEsra. 3. Beneiits of Printing — Greek and Latin Studies — Eminent 
Names — Theology. 4. Translations of the Holy Scriptures — Tyndale's 
Life and Labours — Coverdale — Eogers — Cranmer — Eeigns of Edward the 
Sixth and Mary — Increase of Printers. 5. Original English Writings in 
Theology — Their General Character— Eidley — Crarmier — Tyndale's Con- 
troversial Treatises — Latimer's Sermons — Character of Latimer's Oratory. 

INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD. 

1. The great frontier-line, between the Literary History of the 
Middle Ages and that of the times which we distinguish as Modern, 
lies, for England at least, in the early years of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Intellect then began to be stirred by impulses altogether new ; 
while others, which had as yet been held in check, were allowed, 
one after another, to work freely. 

Yet there did not take place any sudden or universal metamor- 
phosis, either in literature, or in those phenomena, social, intellec- 
tual, and religious, by which its forms and its spmt were deter- 
mined. No such suddenness or completeness of change is possible. 
As well might the traveller, in descending southward from the pine- 



158 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

forests and icy peaks of the Alps, hope to find himself transported 
at once into the orange-groves of Naples, or to see the palms of Sicily- 
waving above his head. 

All the influences by which English Literature was thenceforth to 
be affected, were of such a natm-e that their operation could not 
but be slow ; and some of them manifested themselves in a fashion, 
which caused their immediate effects to be very unlike those that 
might have been expected to flow from them. Both of these things 
are true in regard to the Protestant Reformation, the mightiest of 
the forces which imprinted a new stamp on intellectual activity ; 
and the first of them is true in regard to that new Eevival of Classi- 
cal Learning, which was the second of the predominating literary 
influences. 

The change of faith, a change destined to generate the most bene- 
ficial and elevating developments of opinion and sentiment, was yet, 
through the very earnestness and intensity with which it concentrated 
the minds of thinking men on theological and ecclesiastical ques- 
tions, decidedly unfavourable, for a time, to the more imaginative 
departments of literary exertion. The zeal, again, with which the 
purest models of Latin literature began anew to be studied, and the 
enthusiasm, yet keener, which attended the novel studies of our 
countr}Tnen in the literature of Greece, produced, as it had in Italy 
not long before, both a dearth of originality and an inattention to the 
cultivation of the living tongue. Neither Protestant truth and free- 
dom, nor Classical taste and knowledge, could ripen those literary 
fruits which were their natural offspring, until a process of training 
had been undergone, for which, in any ch'cumstances, a generation or 
two would scarcely have been sufficient. But the circumstances 
which actually occurred, were such as necessarily suspended, for a 
time yet longer, the salutary operation of the purer and more active 
of the two influences. The student of history does not require to 
be reminded, how corruptly prompted, how incomplete and incon- 
sistent in themselves, and how tyrannically and obnoxiously enforced, 
were the steps by which Henry the Eighth became the instrument 
of throwing off the yoke of Rome. We all know, likcAvise, how the 
short reign of Henry's admirable son was inadequate for enabling 
him and his advisers to purify thoroughly and found solidly the 
revolution thus superficial and incomplete ; and how it thus became 
possible for Mary to compel, for a while, formal submission to a 
church in which few of her subjects now trusted, but whose evil 
nature still fewer of them knew well enough to be willing to sacri- 
fice life as the penalty of dissent. 

2. When, in a word, we reflect on the public events which 



CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 159 

marked the reigns of those three sovereigns; when we consider, 
also, that every new kind of knowledge requires to suffer a process 
of digestion, before it can nourish the mind to healthy strength 
and inspire it with original energy; and when we remember how 
gradually and slowly the art of printing itself, the great instrument 
of modern enlightenment, diffused its blessings in the earliest times 
of its operation : we shall not be surprised to discover that, through- 
out a great part of the sixteenth century, English literature did not 
assume a character separating it decisively from that of the ages 
which had gone before. It did not really take its station as the 
worthy organ of a new epoch in the history of civilisation, until 
the reign of Elizabeth was within thirty years of its close. 

We see, then, that our Literature, like our Language, has had 
its era of transition. This character belongs emphatically to 
the period whose phenomena we are about to study, and whose 
bounds might not unfitly be extended a little beyond the point at 
which, for the sake of convenience, it is here marked as ending. 
The scene is dimly lighted ; and the figures that move in it are less 
august than those that will next appear. But the parts they play 
are, in a strict and proper sense, introductory to the great drama 
which is offered to us in the literary history of modern times. 
Among the brilliant works of the Elizabethan age, there is probably 
none, of which we may not detect germs in some of the efforts which 
were made within the half-century that preceded. The great prose 
writers, the masters of the drama, the students in the Italian school 
of poetry, all profited by what had then been done. The literary 
poverty of the Age of the Eeformation was the poverty which the 
settler in an unpeopled country has to endure, while he feUs the 
woods that overshadowed him, and sows his half-tilled fields. ]t 
was a poverty in the bosom of which lay rich abundanes. 

Accordingly this epoch, so mispeakably momentous in the social 
history of Christendom, requires, even from the student of litera- 
ature, an amount of attention far beyond that which might seem 
due to its literary efforts, if these were judged merely as they are 
in themselves. The relations, likewise, which subsisted between 
the intellectual and the religious changes, present themselves to us 
with a frequency which is exceedingly instructive, and through 
which a light is thrown, by each of the two paths of progress, on 
the events that were occurring in the other. It is very curious to 
remark in how many odd ways we see the literature of the day, and 
the ecclesiastical and theological reforms, mixed up together and 
exercising a mutual action. 

Nor do we linger reluctantly over the history of an era, in which, 



160 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

for the sake of goodness and of truth, so much, so very much, was 
earnestly thought, and bravely done, and patiently suffered. Alike 
in the acts, and in the intellectual efforts, of the men who, in the 
face of danger and of death, guided the opinions and the deeds of 
that agitated generation, we acknowledge, amidst all weaknesses 
and faults and sins, a mighty course of events, governed by the 
hand of Him who has willed that man should know the truth and 
through the truth be free. On us, the inheritors of the blessings 
which our forefathers won, devolves the duty of understanding 
rightly the lessons which their history teaches, and of applying 
those lessons to our lives and sentiments, in the spirit of enlight- 
ened knowledge and of Christian love. 

CLASSICAL LEARNING. 

3. The Classical Learning of the age claims our notice first. Its 
cultivation stood m a twofold relation to the changes in the church. 
It was, antecedently, one of the causes of deviation from received 
opinions ; and it became, afterwards, one of the instruments most 
actively used in ecclesiastical controversy, both for attack and for 
defence. 

This was the department of knowledge, and its students were 
the class of readers, that profited, in the first instance, more than 
any others, by the diffusion of the art of printing. The early press 
was employed in the multiplication of ancient books, much more 
frequently than in producing works in any of the living tongues. 
Of the ten thousand editions of books, large and small, which are 
said to have been printed before the close of the fifteenth century, 
more than half appeared in Italy ; and a very large proportion of 
these consisted of classical works. Our English press, producing 
in all, before that date, no more than about a hundred and forty, 
contributed nothing in this department ; but the increased facilities 
of communication between different countries put quickly at the 
disposal of our scholars both the knowledge and the publications of 
the continent. And students were now placed in a position of in- 
calculable advantage, by the reduced price of books. They cost, it 
is said, one-fifth only of the sums which had been paid for manu- 
scripts. 

Foreign men of letters, also, visited England ; and a strong impulse 
was given, especially, by the presence of the accomplished Eras- 
mus. This celebrated scholar, writing about the middle of our pe- 
riod, pronounces England to have then been more exactly learned 
than any contmental nation, excepting Italy alone. Classical 



CLASSICAL LEARNING. 161 

studies were prosecuted, with remarkable ardour, in both of the 
directions in which the improvements of the continent had abeady 
begun. Greek was studied accurately for the first time : Latin was 
learned with an accuracy and purity never before attained. 

The language and literature of Greece had been introduced be- 
fore the begmning of the century, by WiUiam Grocyn, justly called 
the patriarch of English learning, who had studied in Italy under 
the fugitive scholars from Constantinople. The appearance of this 
new branch of erudition excited at first an alarm, which divided 
Oxford into two factions, the Greeks and the Trojans. But en- 
lightenment speedily forced its way. Thomas Linacre, the first 
physician of the day, translated Galen and other authors into 
Latin, and wrote original treatises in the same tongue ; and William 
Lilly, the author, in part, of the old Latin Grammar which bears 
his name, learned Greek at Ehodes, and, on the foundation of 
Saint Paul's school, was the first who publicly taught the language 
in England. Cambridge next became the focus of Hellenic learn- 
ing, through the teaching of two very able men, both of whom were 
soon withdrawn from the academic cloisters to the arena of public 
business : Sir Thomas Smith, who became one of the most eminent 
statesmen of his time ; and Sir John Cheke, whose name will be re- 
membered by most of us as introduced in a sonnet of Milton. 

Latin scholarship flourished not less, in the hands of these and 
other zealous promoters. Among those who became most distin- 
guished in this department, were several who likewise attained to 
eminence elsewhere. Such was Cardinal Pole, Cranmer's succes- 
sor in the see of Canterbury, and one of the most accomplished of 
those ecclesiastics who adhered to the old faith. Of the Reformers, 
though several were creditable scholars, none seem to have been 
very highly celebrated except the martyr Ridley. Of other Latin- 
ists it is enough to name Leland, best known in modern times for 
his researches into English antiquities ; Roger Ascham, the tutor 
of Queen Elizabeth ; and the celebrated and unfortunate Su' Thomas 
More. 

The Latin writings of Ascham are miscellaneous, and not 
very important. The principal work which More composed in 
that language, was the " Utopia," in which he described an imag- 
inary commonwealth, placed on an imaginary island from which 
the book takes its name, and having a polity whose main fea- 
ture is a thorough community of property. The epithet " Uto- 
pian" is still familiar to us, as descriptive of chimerical and fantas- 
tic schemes; and, notwithstanding the good Latinity of More's 
treatise, and the similarity of its design to that of Plato's Republic, 



162 THE AGE OP THE REFORMATION. 

the leading idea really looks so like a grave jest, and such jesting 
was so much in accordance with the character of the man, that we are 
reminded by it of those haK-serious apologues which we found to 
be prevalent in the monasteries of the middle ages. The work, in 
truth, is a romance, although clothed in a scholastic garb ; and it 
abounds with touches of humour and strokes of homely illustra- 
tion. Nor is it wanting in those lessons of wisdom, which its 
strong-minded writer loved so much to inculcate with his quiet 
smile. It is striking, perhaps humiliating to modern pride of en- 
lightenment, to hear the chancellor of Henry the Eighth urging the 
education of the people, asserting solemnly that it is better to pre- 
vent crime than to punish it, and denouncing the severities of the 
penal code as discreditable to England. 

Among the other scholars of the time, may be named John Bale, 
who, in the reign of Edward the Sixth, was made bishop of Ossory. 
Although he was a voluminous writer of English theological tracts, 
chiefly controversial, his memory is now preserved only by certain 
lighter effusions, to be named soon, and by his series of Latin 
Lives of old British Writers, which is stUl an authoritative book 
of reference. 

The stock of ancient learning was thus very large. But it was 
accumulated in the hands of a few capitalists. The communication 
of it, however, to a wider circle, was anxiously aimed at, by the 
foundation of schools and colleges, of which a larger number was 
established in the hundred years which end with the accession of 
Elizabeth, than in any equal period throughout the course of our 
history. The most celebrated benefactors were Dean Colet, the 
founder of Saint Paul's School, and himself one of the most skil- 
ful Latinists of his time ; and Cardinal Wolsey, who was a man of 
learning as well as of political ability, 

THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH. 

4. Among the works couched in the living tongue, the most im- 
portant, by very far, were those which were devoted to Theology. 

Foremost among such efforts, and claiming from us reverent and 
thankful attention, were the Translations of the Scriptures into 
English, none of which had been publicly attempted since that 
of Wycliffe. The history of these is very interesting ; not only for 
its own sake, but also because, as we shall speedily learn, our 
received version of the Bible owes largely to them. 
h. ab. 1485. \ William Tyndale, a native of Gloucestershu-e, a man 
d. 1536. ]" Qf studious and ascetic habits, imbibed, in the early part 
of Henry's reign, many of the opinions of the continental reformers ; 



TKANSLATIONS OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 163 

and he expressed these so openly, in private intercourse and occa- 
sional preaching in the country, that his stay at home was no longer 
safe. He sought refuge in Hamburg and elsewhere, and, in two or 
three years, completed a translation of the New Testament. It was 
printed, under his own care, at Antwerp, in 1526 ; but it has lately 
been shown that two surreptitious editions had appeared the year 
before. In these and other impressions, it was immediately intro- 
duced by stealth into England; Tyndale being employed, mean- 
while, on the Old Testament. His version of the Five Books of 
Moses, really printed successively in different foreign towns, was 
next collected into one volume, which, the statement of the real 
place being dangerous, was described as printed " at Marlborough, 
in the land of Hesse." Its date is January 1530, which, the old 
style being then in use, corresponds with the beginning of our year 
1531. His next publication was a revisal of his New Testament, 
which appeared at Antwerp in 1534 : and with it his labours were 
nearly at a close. Imprisoned at Antwerp for heresy, he was there, 
after a long imprisonment, strangled and burnt, in October 1536. 
In that very year his New Testament was reprinted in England ; 
this being the first translation that issued from an English press. 

The scene -^as now changed. Henry the Eighth had come to an 
irretrievable breach with the See of Eome ; and the opening of the 
Bible to the unlearned was no longer to be held a crime, or prac- 
tised secretly in the fear of punishment. In 1537 there was pub- 
lished, with a dedication to the King and Queen, the first complete 
Translation of the Bible. The translator was a clergyman. Miles 
Coverdale, who afterwards was made bishop of Exeter. From this 
version are taken the Psalms still used in the Book of Common 
Prayer. In the same year there appeared, on the continent, a com- 
plete translation, which, veiled under a fictitious name, was called 
" Matthew's Bible." It was edited by John Eogers, who, some 
years later, was the first Protestant burned by Queen Mary. About 
a third of it is attributed to the editor himself, perhaps with consul- 
tation of Coverdale's version : two-thirds, embracing the whole of 
the New Testament, and the Old as far as the end of the Second 
Book of Chronicles, were, we are told, taken verbatim from Tyn- 
dale. 

Besides Tyndale's own editions of his New Testament, as many 
as twenty others had been printed on the continent, and circulated 
widely through England, before his death. English reprints now 
became common ; and among them were two or three of Coverdale's 
whole translation. 

The reign of Henry gives us, in the last place, the Translation 



164 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

commonly called Cranmer's, from its chief promoter, but known 
also as the Great Bible, from the size ia which its earliest impres- 
sions were printed. It is usually said to differ very slightly from 
Coverdale's, and to have been prepared chiefly by him. But the 
most recent writer of the history of the English Bible seems to 
consider this as a mistake, founded on the appearance of other 
editions about the same time imder the patronage of Cranmer ; 
and, accordiag to this authority, Cranmer's Bible is really a re- 
vision of Tyndale's. Its date, also, commonly set down as 1539, 
appears to be 1540. 

The short reign of Edward the Sixth, the Josiah of England, (as 
he has aptly been called,) produced no new translation ; but it was 
fertUe, to a marvel, ia reprints of those already made, Tyndale's 
being seemingly the most popular. In the six years and a half 
during which this young king filled the throne, the English Bible, 
which he had caused to be carried before him at his coronation, 
was printed entke in fourteen editions at least ; and the editions of 
the New Testament by itself amounted nearly to thirty. 

The accession of Queen Mary stopped, of course, the printing of 
the Scriptures in England, and made the circulation of the transla- 
tions, fortunately .for the last time, a thing to be attempted only in 
secrecy and with fear. Yet even this perilous time introduced one 
new translation from abroad ; namely, the " Geneva " New Testa- 
ment. It was a revision of Tyndale's, performed by WUliam 
Whittingham, a refugee fellow of Oxford. We shall encounter 
him again in the same walk : and then also will appear the received 
version of the Bible. 

In the meantime, the student of literature may be invited to 
observe, how the history of this, the record of the Divine WiU, 
and the history of human and uninsphed productions, dovetaU into 
each other, and reflect mutual light. Some of the most valuable 
contributions ever made to our knowledge of the progress of intel- 
lectual culture in Scotland, were incorporated, not very long ago, in 
a summary of the history of Bible-printing in the country. Here, 
again, in noting the diffusion of the Scriptm-es in England, we en- 
counter some particulars, showing how far the benefits of the press 
were allowed to be reaped under the arbitrary and capricious sway 
of Henry, and how rapidly those benefits extended themselves when 
free communication of aU kinds of knowledge was permitted by his 
excellent son. 

At the accession of Henry the Eighth, there appear to have been 
no more than four printers in England. Before his death the num- 
ber had risen to forty-five. Of these no fewer than thirty-three 



ENGLISH THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS. 165 

appeared in the last twenty years of his reign ; that is, during the 
time when he was gradually seceding from Rome, and had begun 
to relax, in his vacillating and arbitrary way, the restrictions by which 
literary communication was fettered. Still more remarkable was 
that which followed. Fourteen of the forty-five printers surviving 
when Edward the Sixth ascended the throne, his short rule of tol- 
erance and enlightenment added forty-three to the list, raising the 
whole number to fifty-seven. Of these, likewise, thirty-one, or 
more than a half, took part in the printing or publication of the 
Scriptures. 

5. Our attention cannot long be given to the Original Writings, 
couched m the English tongue, and dealing with theological matters. 
Chiefly, of course, controversial, they discuss questions for which 
this is no fit place ; and yet, without treating these, the merits of 
the works could not be fairly appreciated. But the truth is, that 
the treatises of the sort, which this stirring period has transmitted 
to us, are neither so numerous as we might have expected, nor 
marked by qualities which make them very important in the history 
of literature. Neither the learning nor the power of thinking pos- 
sessed either by the Reformers or by then- opponents could be esti- 
mated rightly, unless full account were taken of the writings, on 
both sides, which appeared in the Latin tongue : and, though we 
were to judge with the aid of these materials, still the records of a 
struggle, so hampered by secular interferences and so inextricably 
mixed up with political considerations, would scarcely do justice 
either to the momentous character of the contest, or to the real 
ability and knowledge of those who maintained it. 

It may be enough to name a very few of those who, dying for the 
faith which they taught, have a purer title to the reverence of pos- 
terity than any that could have been gained by the highest liter- 
ary merit. Ridley, held to have been one of the most dexterous 
disputants of his time, and famous as a preacher, has already been 
noticed as the most learned of the Reformers. Cranmer was more re- 
markable for his patronage of theological learning, than for the merit 
possessed by any writings of his own : but his extant English com- 
positions are numerous. 

Two others of the martyrs, whose names seldom occur in any 
general history of literature, were men of much though dissimilar 
power ; and these might be taken, more fitly than most others, as 
examples both of the turn of thinking which then prevailed, and of 
the state of progress of the English language. 

The one was Tyndale, our honoured translator of the Scriptures. 
His English tracts, quite controversial in character, were likewise 



166 THE AGE OF THE EEFOEMATION. 

nothing more than interludes between his weightier labours. Yet, 
slight as they are, his " Obedience of a Christian Man," his disser- 
tation on the parable of '' The Wicked Mammon," his " Practice of 
Prelates," and his few expositions and prefaces, not only show great 
clearness of thinking and aptness of illustration, but are exceedingly 
favourable specimens of Old English style.* 
i. ab. 1472. "| Our second instance is the celebrated Latimer, whose 

d. 1555. J literary remains, chiefly sermons and letters, are of a 
very different stamp, but exceedingly interesting and instructive. 

In the writings of this venerable man we discover no depth of 
learning, and as little refinement of taste : but they abound in homely 
sense and shrewdness ; they show at once earnest and deep piety, 
and a quiet courage, prognosticating indomitable endurance; and 

* WILLIAM TYNDALE. 
From " The Practice of Prelates ;" jniblisTied in 1530. 

[The modern spelling is generally adopted m this Extract, and in those that 
follow.] 

To see how Our Holy Father came up, mark the ensample of an Ivy 
Tree. First it springeth out of the earth, and then a while creepeth along 
by the ground, till it findeth a great tree ; then it joineth itself beneath alow 
xmto the body of the tree, and creepeth up, a little and a little, fair and softly. 
And, at the beginning, while it is yet thin and small, that the burden is not 
perceived, it seemeth glorious, to garnish the tree in winter, and to bear off 
the tempests of the weather. But, in the mean season, it thrusteth roots 
into the bark of the tree, to hold fast withal ; and ceaseth not to climb up, 
till it be at the top and above all. And then it sendeth his branches along 
by the branches of the tree, and overgroweth all, and waxeth great, heavy, 
and thick ; and sucketh the moisture so sore out of the tree and his branches, 
that it choketh and stifleth them. And then the foul ivy waxeth mighty in the 
stump of the tree, and becometh a seat and a nest for all unclean birds, and 
for blind owls which hawk in the dark, and dare not come at the light. 

Even so the Bishop of Eome, at the beginning, crope along upon the 
earth ; and every man trode upon him in this world. But, as soon as there 
came a Christian Emperor, he joined himself unto his feet, and kissed them, 
and crope up a little with begging ; now this privilege, now that ; now this 
city, now that ; to find poor people withal, and the necessary ministers of the 
Word. * * * And thus, with flattering, and feigning, and vain super- 
stition under the name of Saint Peter, he crept up, and fastened his roots in 
the heart of the Emperor ; and with his sword climbed up above all his fel- 
lowships, and brought them under his feet. And, as he subdued them with 
the Emperor's sword, even so, by subtlety and help of them, after that they 
were sworn faithful, he climbed above the Emperor, and subdued him also ; 
and made him stoop unto his feet and kiss them another whil". Yea, Celes- 
tinus crowned the Emperor Henry the Fifth, holding the crown between his 
feet. And, when he had put the crown on, he smote it off with his feet again, 
saying that he had might to make emperors and put them down again. 



ENGLISH THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS. 167 

they are inspired vnth a cheerfulness which never fails. Those who 
sneered at Sir Thomas More as a scoffing jester, might have found 
still apter ground for censure in many effusions of Latimer, both 
while he preached to the peasants of Wiltshii-e and after he had be- 
come the bishop of an important diocese. He jests, and plays on 
words, when he writes letters of business to Cromwell the secretary 
of state ; and, in the pulpit, seizing eagerly on all opportunities of 
interesting his audience by allusions to facts of ordinary life, he 
never allows his illustrations to lose their force through any fear of 
infringing on the gravity of the place. His " Sermon on the 
Plough," the only one remaining from a series of three on the same 
text, expounds and illustrates the duties of the ploughman, that is, 
the preacher of the Gospel, with equal ingenuity of application and 
plainness of speech. In a passage that has often been quoted, he 
takes occasion to describe the experience of his own youth, and the 
frugality of his father's rural household. In another place, the duty 
of residence, strongly urged on the clergy throughout the discourse, 
is enforced by a very original similitude. The spiritual husband- 
man, he says, ought to supply contiuual food to his people : the 
preaching of the word is meat, daily sustenance : it is not straw- 
JDen-ies, which come but once a-year and do not tarry long. The 
metaphor appears to have been relished, and to have suggested a 
descriptive name for clerical absentees. In an extant sermon of the 
time, they are spoken of as " strawberry-preachers." An excursion 
yet wider from clerical formalities is ventm-ed on in his set of " Ser- 
mons on the Card." Preaching at Cambridge in Cliristmas, he teUs 
liis hearers, that, as they are accustomed to make card-playing one 
of the occupations in which they celebrate the festival, he will deal 
to them a better kind of cards, and show them a game in which aU 
the players may win. One scriptm'al text after another is pro- 
nounced and commented on in the odd manner thus promised : 
and the great truth, of the importance of the affections in religion, 
is thrown repeatedly into this quaint shape ; that, in the game of 
souls, hearts are always trumps.* 

* HUGH LATIMER. 
From the Sermon on the Plough ; preached in January 1548. 
But now methinketh I hear one say unto me : Wot ye what you say ? 
Is preaching a work ? Is it a lahour ? How then hath it happened that we 
have had, so many hundred years, so many unpreaching prelates, lording 
loiterers, and idle ministers ? Ye would have me here to make answer, and to 
show the cause thereof. Nay ! This land is not for me to plough. It is too 
stony, too thorny, too hard for me to plough. They have so many things 
that make for them, so many things to lay for themselves, that it is not for 



168 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

Such eccentricities, however discordant with modern taste, must 
be judged with a recollection of the time in which they appeared ; 
and their prevalence is a feature not to be overlooked, in the elo- 
quence of a man who was admittedly one of the most impressive pub- 
lic speakers of his day. His sermons deserve commendation more 
unqualified, for their general simplicity of plan. They have little 
or nothing of the scholastic complication and multiplicity of subdi- 
visions, which made their appearance in the theological compositions 
of the next age, and which characterize almost all efforts of the 
kind made in our language till we have proceeded beyond the middle 
of the seventeenth century. 

Before we quit those who acted and suffered in the Eeformation, 
Ave must remember John Fox, their zealous but honest memoriahst. 
His " History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church," better 
known as " The Book of Martyrs," was first printed in his exile, 
towards the close of our period. 

my weak team to plough them. And I fear me this land is not yet ripe to 
be ploughed : for, as the saying is, it lacketh weathering ; this gear lacketh 
weathering ; at least way it is not for me to plough. For what shall I look 
for among thorns, but pricking and scratching ? What among stones, hut 
stumbling ? What (I had almost said) among serpents, but stinging ? But 
this much I dare say, that, since lording and loitering hath come up, preach- 
ing hath come down, contrary to the Apostles' times ; for they preached and 
lorded not, and now they lord and preach not. * * * And thus, if the 
ploughmen of the country were as negligent in their office as prelates be, we 
should not long live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to 
have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also 
the other for the satisfaction of the soul ; or else we cannot live long ghostly. 
For, as the body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so 
doth the soul pine away for default of ghostly meat. 



MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 169 

CHAPTER II. 

THE AGE OF THE PEOTESTANT EEFOEMATION. 
A. D. 1509— A. D. 1558. 

SECTION SECOND : MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE IN ENGLAND I" 

AND LITERATURE ECCLESIASTICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS 

IN SCOTLAND. 

Miscellaneous Peose in England. 1. Secondary Importance of the 
Works — Sir Thomas More — His Style — His Historical "Writings — His 
Tracts and Letters. — 2. Roger Ascham — His Style — His Toxophilns — 
His Schoolmaster — Prosody — Female Education — Wilson's Logic and 
Rhetoric. — English Poetry. 3. Poetical Aspect and Relations of the 
Age — Its Earliest Poetry — Satires — Barklay — Skelton's Works. — 4. Lord 
Surrey — His Literary Influence — Its Causes — His Italian Studies — His 
Sonnets — Introduction of Blank Verse — His Supposed Influence on Eng- 
lish Versification. — 5. Wyatt— Translations of the Psalms — The MiiTor 
of Magistrates — Its Influence — Its Plan and Authors — Sackville's Induc- 
tion and Complaint of Buckingham. — Infancy of the English De^ma. 
6. Retrospect — The English Drama in the Middle Ages — Its Religious 
Cast— The Miracle-Plays— The Moral-Plays.— 7. The Drama in the Six- 
teenth Centmy — Its Beginnings — Skelton — Bishop Bale's Moral Plays — 
Heywood's Interludes. — 8. Appearance of Tragedy and Comedy — Udall's 
Comedy of Roister Doister — The Tragedy of Gorboduc, by Sackville and 
Norton. — Liteeatuee in Scotland. 9. Literary Character of the 
Period — Obstacles — State of the Language. — 10. Scottish Poetry — 
Sir David Lindsay — His Satu'ical Play — Its Design and Effects — His 
other Poems. — 11. Fii'st Appearance of Original Scottish Prose — Trans- 
lations — The Complaint of Scotland — Pitscottie — State of Leai-ning — 
Boece — John Major. — 12. John Knox — George Buchanan's Latin Works 
— Other Latinists — Melville — Scottish Universities — Schools- 

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 

1. Pausing in our survey of ecclesiastical literature in England, at 
the moment when Protestantism rejoiced in the accession of Eliza- 
beth, we quit the cloister, from which the monks have been cast 
out, and the church, in which the mass is no longer chanted; 
and we are content, perforce, with the little we have had time to 
learn in regard to the most abstruse of the studies out of which 
emerged the light of the Reformation. We now look abroad on 

H 



170 THE AGE OF THE EEFOEMATION. 

those literary pursuits of the same period, whose aim was neither 
religious nor ecclesiastical, and whose natural and appropriate 
organ was the liviug tongue of the nation. 

New actors will appear on the scene : yet some of those whom 
we have encountered as combatants in the fiery struggle of creeds, 
will again be seen in the quieter walks along which our eye is next 
to be guided. Nor are the few names, which only can here be set 
down, sufficient to show, at all distinctly, how close was the con- 
nexion, in that fervent age, not only between the ecclesiastical 
changes and the progress of literature, but between the men who 
led the former and those who most efficiently promoted the latter. 

"V^Tiile the theological writings which have just been noticed 
are, admittedly, valuable chiefly for their matter, the miscellane- 
ous writings of the age in English prose attract us most as 
specimens of the langiiage in its earliest stage of maturity. None 
of them exhibit either such eloquence or such vigour of thought, as 
should entitle them to a liigh rank among the monuments of our 
literature ; and, with few exceptions, the very names of the writers 
have been allowed to sink into complete oblivion. 
1. 1480. \ Sir Thomas More was commemorated when we studied 
d. 1535. j ^]^Q progress of the language, as having been called the ear- 
— liest writer whose EngUsh prose was good. This eminent man wrote 
purely, natm-ally, and perspicuously. His style, indeed, has very 
great excellence ; and it, with that of the other writer who will here 
be cited, should be studied as characteristically showing, when we 
compare it with the manner of the prose which was written in the 
next period, a simplicity, both of construction and of diction, which 
may be accounted for in more ways than one. Certainly less cum- 
brous, as well as less exotic, the style of More and Ascham may 
have been so, either because classical studies had not yet become 
familiar enough to produce a great effect on the manner of expres- 
sion, or because the writers were compelled to be the less ambitious 
in proportion to then- want of mastery over the resources of their 
native tongue. 

More's works, Latin and English, are but the recreations in which 
a highly accomplished man, placed in the midst of a learned age, 
spent the little leisure allowed by a life of professional and public 
business. His Historical Writings are among the very earliest that 
belong to our period ; and they have received very wann conunenda- 
tion, not only for then* style, but for the ease and spirit of the narra- 
tive. There is not any work of the fifteenth century, that has merit 
enough to forbid our considering him as the earliest writer of the 
English language, who rose to the dignity and skill of proper his- 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 171 

tory. His Controversial Tracts are perhaps equally good in lan- 
guage ; but, occupied with the ecclesiastical questions of his day, 
they fall beyond our sphere. His " Dialogue concerning Heresies" 
led him into a hot contest with Tyndale. When we are thus re- 
minded that More adhered to the old faith, we must remember also 
that this was the losing side, and that the great and good man 
proved his sincerity by dying for what he held to be the truth. 
He was as really a martyr as Cranmer ; and he was much braver 
and more upright in conduct. Nowhere do we meet him on ground 
where his cheerful kindliness and excellent judgment have freer 
room to work, than in his private letters, especially those which he 
addressed to the members of his family; and from none of his 
writings could we cull examples better illustrating the character of 
his style.* 

* SIR THOMAS MOKE. 
A Letter to his Children ; tm-itten about 1525. 

Thomas More, to his best beloved children, and to Margaret, whom he 
numbereth among his own, sendeth greeting. 

The merchant of Bristow brought unto me your letters, the next day after 
he had received them of you ; with the which I was exceedingly delighted. 
For there can come nothing, yea though it were never so rude, never so 
meanly polished, from this your shop, but it procureth me more delight than 
any others' works, be they never so eloquent : your writing doth so stir up 
my affection towards you. But, excluding this, your letters may also very 
well please me for their own worth, being full of fine wit and of a pure Latin 
phrase : therefore none of them all but joyed me exceedingly. Yet, to tell 
you ingenuously what I think, my son John's letter pleased me best ; both 
because it was longer than the other, as also for that he seemeth to have 
taken more pains than the rest. For he not only painteth out the matter 
decently, and speaketh elegantly ; but he playeth also pleasantly with me, 
and returneth my jests upon me again, very wittily: and this he doth not 
only pleasantly, but temperately withal ; showing that he is mindful with 
whom he jesteth, to wit, his father, whom he endeavoureth so to delight 
that he is also afeared to offend. 

Hereafter I expect every day letters from every one of you : neither will 
T accept of such excuses as you complain of ; that you have no leisure, or 
that the carrier went away suddenly, or that you have no matter to write : 
John is not wont to allege any such thing. Nothing can hinder you from 
writing ; but many things may exhort you thereto. Why should you lay 
any fault upon the carrier, seeing you may prevent his coming, and have 
them ready made up and sealed two days before any offer themselves to 
carry them ? And how can you want matter of writing unto me, who am 
delighted to hear either of your studies or of your play ; whom you may 
even then please exceedingly, when, having nothing to write of, you write 
as largely as you can of that nothing, than which nothing is more easy for 
you to do. 



172 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

&. 1515.) 2. The writings of the learned and judicious Ascham 
d. 1568. J possess, both in style and in matter, a value which must not 
be measured by their inconsiderable bulk. Their language is pure, 
idiomatic, vigorous English : they exhibit great variety of knowl- 
edge, remarkable sagacity, and sound common-sense. 

Of his three large treatises, the earliest was a " Report on the 
State of Germany," being a digested account of his observations on 
the political affairs of the continent ; a discourse highly creditable to 
the writer's shrewdness, but now uninterestuig, unless to the exact 
students of the history of the times. 

Next came the " Toxophilus : the School or Partitions of Shoot- 
ing." It is a treatise on Archery ; an art which, now a mere 
pastime, and even then beginning to be superseded in warfare, 
had not yet lost all the importance it possessed when the Eng- 
lish bowmen thinned the French ranks at Agincourt. The work 
is a dialogue in two books, sustained with much liveliness of 
tone, as well as discrimination of character, between Philologus, a 
student, and Toxophilus, a lover of archery. The form is thus 
adopted from classical models ; and it is a point illustrative of the 
tastes of the day, that the author, in his preface, thinks it necessary 
to justify himself for writing in English rather than in Latin. The 
second of the two books is aftianual of the rules of the art ; the 
first is a curious dissertation on its value. It is recommended for 
general adoption on the ground of its military importance, which 
is shown by a variety of instances spiritedly related. It is recom- 
mended especially to persons of studious habits ; being, it is alleged, 
the best of all those amusements which, as the writer maintains 
with great force of reasoning, are absolutely required by reading 

But this I admonish you to do ; that, whether you write of serious 
matters or of trifles, you write with diligence and consideration, premeditat- 
ing of it before. Neither will it he amiss, if you first indite it in English ; 
for then it may more easily be translated into Latin, whilst the mind, free 
from inventing, is attentive to find apt and eloquent words. And, although 
I put this to your choice, whether you will do so or no, yet I enjoin you, 
by all means, that you diligently examine what you have written before you 
write it over fair again ; first considering attentively the whole sentence, and 
after examine every part thereof ; by which means you may easily find out 
if any solecisms have escaped you ; which being put out, and your letter 
written fair, yet then let it not also trouble you to examine it over again ; 
for sometimes the same faults creep in at the second writing, which you 
before had blotted out. By this your diligence you will procure, that those 
your trifles will seem serious matters. For, as nothing is so pleasing but 
may be made unsavoury by prating garrulity, so nothing is by nature so un- 
pleasant, that by industry may not be made full of grace and pleasantness. 

Farewell, my sweetest children. From the Court, this 3d of September. 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 173 

men, for the sake both of health and of mental relaxation. Gam- 
ing, and other censurable diversions, are energetically denounced. 
The common athletic games are maintained, more ingeniously than 
soundly, to be in several ways objectionable ; and music itself, ad- 
mitted to be an essential part in the education of a scholar and a 
gentleman, is yet asserted to have disadvantages from which the 
manly old English exercise is quite exempt.* 

* ROGER ASCHAM. 

From the Preface to the " Toxo;philus f published in 1544. 

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or 
else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him ; that, 
when the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the 
meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to vrrite. And, though to 
have written it in another tongue had been both more profitable for my 
study, and also more honest for my name ; yet I can think my labour well 
bestowed, if, with a little hindrance of my profit and name, may come any 
furtherance to the pleasure or commodity of the gentlemen and yeomen of 
England, for whose sake I took this matter in hand. 

And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done 
in them that none can do better ; in the English tongue, contrary, every 
thing in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and handling, that no man 
can do worse. For therein the least learned, for the most part, have been 
always most ready to write. And they which had least hope in Latin, 
have been most bold in English ; when surely every man that is most ready 
to talk, is not most able to write. 

He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of 
Aristotle : to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do : as 
so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow 
him. Many English writers have not done so, but, using strange words, as 
Latin, French, and Italian, do make all things dark and hard. Once I com- 
muned with a man which reasoned the English tongue to be enriched and 
increased thereby, saying, " Who will not praise that feast, where a man 
shall drink at a dinner both wine, ale, and beer?" "Truly," quoth I, 
" they be all good, every one taken by himself alone ; but, if you put malm- 
sey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, and all in one pot, you shall 
make a drink not easy to be known, nor yet wholesome for the body." 

English writers, by diversity of time, have taken divers matters in 
hand. In our fathers' time, nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, 
wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end but only man- 
slaughter and lewdness. If any man suppose they were good enough to pass 
the time withal, he is deceived. For surely vain words do work no small 
thing in vain, ignorant, and young minds ; especially if they be given any- 
thing thereunto of their own nature. These books, as I have heard say, 
were made the most part in abbeys and monasteries ; a very likely and fit 
fruit of such an idle and blind kind of living. In our time, now, when every 
man is given to know, much rather than to live well, very many do write, 
but after such a fashion as very many do shoot. Some shooters take in hand 



174 THE AGE OF THE EEFOKMATION. 

There is much greater vahie in the matter, but considerably less 
of liveliness in the composition, of Ascham's most celebrated work, 
" The Schoolmaster." It is introduced in a strain reminding us,,yet 
again, of the manner in which the philosophers of antiquity loved to 
give an air of dramatic reality to their speculations. In the year 
1563, when the court had sought refuge at Windsor from the plague 
which then raged in London, Elizabeth's tutor dines, with several 
of the royal counsellors, in the chamber of the secretary, the elder 
Cecil, afterwards known by his title of Lord Burleigh. The host 
says he had just heard, that some of the pupils of Eton had run 
away from the school for fear of beating. The news leads to a con- 
versation on the discipline of the young, and the comparative effi- 
cacy of love and fear in teaching. The treasurer, Sir Eichard Sack- 
ville, who is described as taking a lively interest in the education 
of his grandsons, pays close attention to the discussion ; and, after 
Ascham had been released from his reading of Demosthenes with 
the Queen, the argument is renewed between the two. On Sack- 
viUe's request, Ascham proceeds to record his opinions, dividing his 
treatise into two books. The first is described as " Teaching the 
Bringing up of Youth." It abounds with good sense and right 
feeling, and, though scholastic and somewhat formal m shape, is 
still interesting as well as suggestive. The Second Book is an- 
nounced as " Teaching the Ready Way to the Latin Tongue." It 
has the appearance of being iacomplete ; the excellent critical 
remarks on Roman authors breaking off abruptly. While the 
whole work well deserves to be studied by teachers, this part of it, 
in particular, proposes improvements for which there are still both 
room and need ; and the value of the hints is not unappreciated. 
One of the first classical scholars of our own day, in recently edit- 
ing a work of Cicero, has supported his arguments in support of 
certain methods of teaching, by a long quotation from Ascham's 
Second Book. 

stronger bows than they be able to maintain. This thing maketh them some- 
time to overshoot the mark, sometime to shoot far wide, and perchance 
hurt some that look on. Other, that never learned to shoot, nor yet knoweth 
good shaft nor bow, will be as busy as the best. If any man will apply 
these things together, he shall not see the one far diflfer from the other. 

And I also, amongst all other, in writing this little treatise, have fol- 
lowed some young shooters, which both will begin to shoot for a little money, 
and also will use to shoot once or twice about the mark for nought, before 
they begin for good. And therefore did I take this little matter in hand, to 
assay myself; and hereafter, if judgment of wise men that look on think that 
I can do any good, I may perchance cast my shaft among other, for better 
game. 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 175 

Two passages of " The Schoolmaster" deserve, for different rea- 
sons, special remembrance. 

In the one, the writer treats the versification of the modern 
languages. He vehemently condemns rhyme as barbarous, urging 
a return to the unrhymed measures of the ancients. Yet he shows 
that he understood thoroughly the prosodial structure of the 
English tongue. For, on the one hand, he prophesies utter failure 
in all attempts to naturalize the classical hexameters; attempts 
which were industriously made in the next generation, and had 
precisely the issue Avhich this acute critic had foreseen. On the 
other hand, he points out the iambic metres as those for which our 
language has the greatest aptitude, and recommends, as models for 
English rhythm, the recent versification of Lord Surrey : that is, as 
we shall immediately learn, he hails the introduction of blank verse, 
imquestionably the finest of all our metrical forms. 

The other passage that has been alluded to, is one which is very 
well known. He relates, in it, how, visiting his pupil Lady Jane 
Grey in Leicestershire, he found her reading Plato in the original 
Greek, while her parents and their household were hunting in the 
park. The learning of this unfortunate lady, that of Queen Eliza- 
beth herself, and the similar pains bestowed by Sir Thomas More 
on the instruction of his daughters, are striking examples of that 
zeal for the diffusion of education, and of education reaching up to 
a very high point, which actuated our countrymen so strongly 
during the sixteenth century. 

While Ascham announced new views in education, another 
writer endeavoured, with much talent, to popularize sciences that 
had long been known and taught. Thomas Wilson, who, like so 
many other accomplished men of the time, transferred himself in 
mature life from the closet to the business of the state, published, 
in the middle of the century, " The Rule of Reason, containing the 
Art of Logic," and, a little afterwards, " The Art of Rhetoric." 
The couching of such treatises in the living tongue, was an innova- 
tion well worthy of being chronicled. The works themselves are 
good : the latter, in particular, having been published several years 
before Ascham's book, gives the author some right to be regarded 
as having been the earliest critical writer in the English language. 
One incident in his life is interestmg. Emigrating to the continent, 
on Queen Mary's accession, and prosecutmg his studies in Italy, he 
was apprehended by the Inquisition in Rome. On the accession of 
a new pope, the populace of the city broke open the prisons ; and 
among those captives who escaped were Wilson, and the Scottish 
Reformer Craig. 



176 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 



ENGLISH POETRY NON-DRAMATIC. 

3. The Poetry which arose in England, during the reigns of 
Henry and his next successors, is, quite as much as the kinds of 
literature that have already been reviewed, important rather for 
its relations to other things than for its own merit. Yet it occu- 
pies a higher place than the prose, in our literary history. It 
exhibits, in temper, in manner, and in the nature of the topics 
selected, a very decisive contrast to the poetry of the times that 
were past : it bears in several points a close resemblance, and it 
furnished many materials and many forms, to the poetry of the 
energetic age that was soon to open. 

The poetical names with which we require to form an acquaint- 
ance are very few : and the character of the works might be under- 
stood most easily if we were to arrange them in three groups, which 
would exhibit three dissimilar stages in the progress of taste and 
literary cultivation. In the first of these the chief was Skelton : 
the second was headed by Surrey; and the third, which shows 
deviation, perhaps, rather than progress, may be represented by 
Sackville. This classification should be remembered ; though the 
order of the minor poets would make it inapplicable to a full 
history of the time. 

The irregular pomp of chivalrous and allegoric pageantry, which 
accompanied us in our survey of the middle ages, had in the mean- 
time vanished. Its last appearance was in the poem of Hawes, 
which, as already noticed, might have been referred, witliout impro- 
priety, to the beginning of this period. It was succeeded, at first, 
by nothing higher than a Satirical kind of Poetry, in which features 
of actual life were depicted and anatomized, in a spiiit caught from 
the prevalent restlessness and discontent. One of its effusions was 
Alexander Barklay's " Ship of Fools," translated from a continental 
work, but containing many additions illustratmg the weaknesses 
and vices of English life and manners. It is a general moral satire, 
having very little that is either vigorous or amusing. 

The poems, if they deserve to be so called, of the eccentric 
I •^^^^ Skelton, are not only more interesting for their 
" J closeness of application to historical incidents and per- 
sons, but are singularly though coarsely energetic, and do not 
altogether want glimmerings of poetical fancy. After having been 
the tutor of Henry the Eighth, he continued to write during the 
greater part of his pupil's reign, satirizing ecclesiastical and social 
abuses, attacking great men in the full flush of their power, and 
taking gi-eater liberties with none than with the formidable Wolsey. 



POETICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 177 

The point of his sarcasms is not infrequently lost, through obscure 
and aimless digressions and mystifications, which may plausibly be 
attributed to an occasional fit of caution. But the personalities 
are still oftener so undisguised, and the malicious bitterness is 
so provoking, that the impunity enjoyed by the libeller is a 
matter of surprise, although we make the fullest allowance for the 
caprice and inconsistency which at all times marked the adminis- 
tration of the king. There are not, in Skelton's works, very 
many verses that rise into the region of poetry : but his acuteness 
of observation, his keenness of humour, and his inexhaustible fer- 
tility of familiarly fanciful illustration, impart to his pieces an ex- 
ceedingly curious and amusing grotesqueness. His command of 
words, too, is quite extraordinary. It not only gave good augury 
of the futm*e development of the language, but showed that, by 
him at least, rapid progress had already been made. Although his 
task was much aided by his unscrupulous coinage of new and 
ridiculous terms, and by his frequent indentation of Latin words and 
lines into his English, yet the volubility with which he vents his 
acrid himiour is truly surprising ; and it is made the more so 
through the difficulties imposed on him by the kind of versification, 
which, seemingly invented by himself, he used oftener than any 
other. It consists of exceedingly short lines, many of which often 
rhyme together in close succession, and have double or triple 
endings.* 

* JOHN SKELTON. 

From '■'■Colin Clout f in loMch the abuses said to prevail in the Church are 
set forth in long complaints^ put into the mouths of the people^ and interspersed 
vyith very short and doubtful expressions of dissent hy the poet. 

What trow ye they say more I wot not how they wark : 

Of the bishops' lore ? Bat thus the people cark. 
How in matters thej be raw : * * * 

They lumber forth the law, And all they lay 

And judge it as they will, On you prelates, and say, 

For other men's skill, Ye do wrong and no right : 

Expounding out their clauses. No matins at midnight ! 

And leave their own causes. Book and chalice gone quite ! 

In their principal cure Pluck away the leads 

They make but little sure, Over their heads ; 

And meddles very light And sell away their bells, 

In the church's right. And all that they have else : 



* * * 



Thus the people tells ; 



And whiles the heads do this, Eails like rebels. 
The remnant is amiss Eede shrewdly and spells : 

Of the clergy all, How ye break the dead's wills : 

Both great and small. Turn monasteries into water-mills ; 

h2 



178 THE AGE OF THE REFOKMATION. 

4, A new era in the histoiy of our poetry was unquestionably 
1). ab. 1516. 1 opened by the works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. 
d. 1547. J jjj respect of poetical \dgour and originality, this accom- 
plished and ill-fated person was inferior to many poets who have 
long been forgotten : but his foreign studies, and his refinement of 
taste and feeling, concurred in enabling him to turn our poetical 
literature into a track which had not yet been trodden. 

The works through which Surrey's influence was exerted were of 
twokmds : a collection of Sonnets and other poems of a Lyrical and 
Amatory cast ; and a Translation of the Second and Fourth Books of 
the ^neid. All of them have this in common ; that they are imi- 
tations of Italian models, which, in our country, had not yet per- 
haps been by any one studied exactly, and had certainly never yet 
been imitated. His were the first Sonnets in our language ; so that 
he gave us a new form of poetical composition, and a form which, 
used with zealous frequency by all the greatest poets of the Eliza- 
bethan age, has not lost its hold from that time to this. Nor was 
there less of novelty in the introduction of that refined and senti- 
mental turn of thought, which breathes through all his lyrics, and 
which was prompted by Petrarch and his other Italian masters. 
The Italian studies of our poets of the fourteenth century, lay, as 
we have learned, in other quarters : the Petrarchan subtilties and 
conceits, and the Petrarchan tenderness and reflectiveness, were 
alike ungenial to then* rougher and more manly temperament. 
Surrey was thus our usher into a poetical school, in which, for 
much good and not a little harm, succeeding poets became both 
pupils and teachers : and, it should also be remembered, his studies 
in the poetry of Italy, as it existed before his own day, prepared the 
way for introducmg to the notice of his successors the greater 
Italian works which were produced in his century. Surrey's fa- 
miliarity with Petrarch's lyrics was a step towards Spenser's ac- 
quaintance with the chivalrous epic of Tasso. 

His ^neid conferred on us an obligation yet weightier. It 
was not the first translation of a classical poem into English verse ; 
unless indeed we should think om*selves compelled to refuse the 
name of English to the language used in Gawain Douglas's ver- 
sion, from which, indeed, Surrey borrowed not a little. But it was 
the first specimen of English Blank Verse : the unwonted metre 
was handled, not very skilfully, indeed, yet with a success which 

Of an abbey ye make a grange. What could the Turk do more, 

Your "works, they say, ai'e strange. With all his false lore ? 

Turk, Saracen, or Jew ? 
* * * I report me to you. 



POETICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 179 

instantly recommended it for adoption : and thus we have to thank 
Surrey for a form of versification, in which the noblest poetry of 
our tongue has since been couched, and but for which our drama 
and our epic would alike have been incomparably meaner and 
feebler and less animated. This was another of his importations 
from Italy, in which a similar metre appeared early in the century,* 

* LORD SURREY. 

I. A SONNET ON EARLY SUMMER. 

The sweet season, that bud and bloom forth brings, 

With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale : 
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ; 

The turtle to her mate hath told her tale. 
Summer is come ; for every spray now springs. 

The hart hath hung his old head on the pale ; 
The buck in brake his winter-coat he flings ; 

The fishes fleet with new repaired scale ; 
The adder all her slough away she flings : 

The swift swallow pursueth the flies small : 
The busy bee her honey now she mings : ^ 

Winter is worn that was the flower's bale. 
And thus, I see, among these pleasant things 
Each care decays ; and yet my sorrow springs. 



U. FROM THE TRANSLATION OF THE ^NEID, BOOK SECOND. 

The Ghost of Creusa vanishing from u^meas. 
Thus having said, she left me, all in tears 
And minding much to speak ; but she was gone, 
And subtly fled into the weightless air. 
Thrice raught ^ I with mine arms to accol ^ her neck , 
Thrice did my hands' vain hold the image escape. 
Like nimble winds and like the flying dream. 
So, night spent out, return I to my feres ; * 
And there, wond'ring, I find together swarmed 
A new number of mates : mothers and men, 
A rout exiled, a wretched multitude, 
From each where flock together, prest ^ to pass, 
With heart and goods, to whatsoever land 
By sliding seas we listed them to lead. 

And now rose Lucifer above the ridge 
Of lusty Ide, and brought the dawning light. 
The Greeks held the entries of the gates beset. 
Of help there was no hope. Then gave I place. 
Took up my sire, and hasted to the hill. 

Mingles. ^ Reached. ^ Embrace. * Companions. ^ Ready. 



180 THE AGE OF THE EEFOEMATION. 

One is strongly tempted to pass over, in silence, on account of its 
real frivolousness, another claim which has been made on behalf of 
the noble poet. He is asserted to have been the writer who sub- 
stituted, in our poetry, the counting of metres by syllables for the 
counting of them by accents. The true state of the case seems to 
be simply this. The accentual reckoning of measure was undoubt- 
edly the oldest practice ; and, in a strongly accented tongue like 
ours, it was the only one at all likely to be used in the ruder 
stages of literature. But the syllabic reckoning naturally and 
inevitably began to be taken more and more into account, as some- 
thing like criticism arose : and the general substitution of the latter 
for the former took place the more readily, because of the tendency 
of our words to fall into iambics, which made the two reckonings to 
coincide not infrequently even in older times, and to coincide 
oftener and oftener as pronunciation became more fixed. Although 
the accentual counting is the safer and more convenient of the two 
for our reading of all our mediaeval poetry, the other is applicable 
in a great number of instances, as early as Chaucer himself: it 
prevailed more and more widely afterwards : and it appears to be 
almost universally applicable to our later poetry of the fifteenth 
century, in both kingdoms of the island. That Surrey, guided by 
his foreign examples, followed the modern fashion more strictly 
than any before him, (though by no means always,) is probably 
true : and it cannot well be doubted that, in this as m other re- 
spects, his example had much effect in making the adoption of it 
universal. Just as certain is it, that the old tendency towards 
accentual scanning survived his time. It shows itself very strongly 
in the versification of the dramatists in the Elizabethan age, and is 
used by some of them with much freedom and excellent effect : and, 
further, its congeniality to the structure of our language is shown 
by the rich and varied melody which, through its re-introduction, 
has been attained by several poets of our own time. 

5. Along with Surrey is commonly named the elder Sir Thomas 
Wyatt ; a conjunction made proper not only by the friendship of 
the two, but by a general likeness m taste, sentiment, and poetical 
forms. But Wyatt, wanting his friend's merit as the originator of 
valuable changes, does not call for very particular notice by his 
greater vigour of style and keenness of observation. His poetry is 
more diversified in kind than that of his friend : he indulged freely 
in epigram and satire ; and he attempted, much more frequently, 
versified translation from the Scriptures. 

His and Surrey's versions of some of the Psalms are the most 
polished among many attempts of the sort made in their time, none 



POETICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND. 181 

of them with much success. Not good, but not the worst of these, 
and better than the feeble modern rhymes by which it has been 
superseded, was the complete Translation of the Psalms, which bears 
the names of Sternhold and Hopkins. More than a hundred of the 
psalm.s were from the pen of these two ; but there were also other 
translators. One of them was Whittingham, already noticed as the 
editor of the Geneva New Testament : and another was Norton, a 
lawyer, whom we shall immediately know as a dramatist, and who 
distinguished himself likewise as an able controversialist against 
Romanism. The whole collection was not published till 1562. 

To the very close of our period belongs an extremely singular 
work, in which there was struck out, by the ingenuity of its de- 
signer, an idea poorly embodied by his assistants, but suggesting a 
great deal to the poets of the next age. It was entitled " A Mirror 
for Magistrates." It is a large collection of separate poems, cele- 
brating personages, illustrious but unfortunate, who figure in the 
history of England. The intention was, that the series should ex- 
tend from the Conquest to the end of the fifteenth century : but a small 
part only of the plan was executed in the earliest edition of the work ; 
and it was not completed by all the additions which its popularity 
caused it to receive in the early part of Elizabeth's reign. The 
chief contributors to it in its oldest shape were Baldwyne, an 
ecclesiastic, and Ferrers, a lawyer; and among the others were 
Churchyard, a voluminous writer of verses then and long after- 
wards, and Phaer, who translated a part of the ^neid. The his- 
torical design, and the method of calling up each of the heroes to 
tell his own tale, furnished hints for a kind of poems written by 
several eminent men whom we shall encounter in a later age : and 
some poets yet greater, Spenser himself for one, have been traced 
in direct borrowing of particulars from the " Mirror." Otherwise 
none of the pieces contained in this ponderous mass are worthy of 
special notice, except the small portions written by the projector, 
b. 1536. > who was Thomas Sackville, oftener known as Lord Buck- 
d. 1608. J hurst. It was for the benefit of his children that their 
grandfather prompted the composition of Ascham's " Schoolmaster." 

Plannmg the work in the middle of Mary's reign, Sackville threw 
over it a gloom which, as a poet has remarked, may naturally have 
been inspired by the scenes of terror amidst which he stood. He 
himself wrote only the "Induction," or prefatory poem, and the 
" Complaint of Henry duke of Buckingham," the friend and victun 
of Richard the Third, with which it was intended that the series should 
be closed. The Induction, which is very much more vigorous and 
poetical than the Complaint, derives its form, partly at least, from 



182 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

the Italian poet Dante ; while its cast of imagination is that which 
has become so familiar to us in the later poetry of the middle ages. 
It is a very remarkable poem, and has furnished hints to other poetical 
minds. It has a fine vein of solemn imagination, which is especially 
active in the conception of allegoric personages. Its plan is this. 
While the poet muses sadly, in the depth of winter, over nature's 
decay and man's infirmity. Sorrow appears to him in bodily form, 
and leads him into the world of the dead. Within the porch of 
the dread abode is seen a terrible group of shadowy figures, who 
are painted with great originality and force : there are, among them, 
Eemorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old- Age, Famine, 
War, and Death. These are the rulers and peoplers of the realm 
below. Then, when the dark lake of Acheron has been crossed, 
the ghosts of the mighty and unfortunate dead stalk in awful pro- 
cession past the poet and his conductor. Here, evidently, a prelude 
is struck to some of the fullest strains which resound in Spenser's 
Faerie Queene.* 

* THOMAS SACKVILLE. 
From " The Mirror for MagistroMs f ;publishedin 1559. 

I. TEOM THE INDUCTION. 

By him lay heavy Sleep, the cousin of Death, 

Flat on the ground, and still as any stone ; 
A very corpse, save yielding forth a breath : 

Small keep ^ took he whom fortune frowned on, 

Or whom she lifted up into the throne 
Of high renown : but, as a living death, 
So dead-alive, of life he drew the breath. 
The body's rest, the quiet of the heart, 

The travail's ease, the still night's fere 2 was he, 
And of our life on earth the better part : 

Eeiver 3 of sight, and yet in whom we see 

Things oft that tide,^ and oft that never be : 
Without respect, esteeming equally 
King Crcesus' pomp, and Irus' poverty. 

II. FROM THE COMPLAINT OF BUCKINGHAM. 

Midnight was come : and every vital thing 
With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest. 

The beasts were still : the little birds that sing. 
Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast ; 
The old and young were shrouded in their nest. 

The waters calm ; the cruel seas did cease ; 

The woods, the fields, and all things, held their peace. 

1 Care. 2 Companion. 3 Bereaver. 4 Betide. 



THE AGE OF THE EEFORMATION. 183 

THE INFANCY OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

6. Our acquaintance with the English literature of this agitated 
time is not complete, until we have learned something as to the 
progress then made by the Drama. This department of poetry has 
been left almost unnoticed in the previous sections of our studies ; 
because there did not then arise in it anything which possessed 
literary merit deserving of commemoration. But it had existed 
among us, as in every other country of Europe, from a very early 
date ; and its history now calls for a hasty retrospect. 

The dramatic exhibitions of the middle ages, if they did not 
take their origin in the church, were at all events speedily appro- 
priated by the clergy. They had invariably a religious cast ; many 
of them were composed by priests and monks ; convents were very 
frequently the places in which they were performed ; and ecclesias- 
tics were to be found not seldom among the actors. These facts 
are differently commented on by different critics. Here it is enough 
for us to know, that, through the extreme popularity of the drama 
in those rude and primitive forms, the mass of the people, during 
many generations, probably owed to it the chief acquaintance 
which they were permitted to attain with biblical and legendary 
history. 

All the old religious plays are by some writers described under the 
name of Mysteries. When they are narrowly examined, it is found 
that they may be distributed into two classes. The first, which was 
also the earliest, contained the Miracles or Miracle-Plays. These 
were founded on the narratives of the Bible or on the legends of 
the saints. To the second class belonged the Moralities, Morals, 
or Moral-Plays, which gradually arose out of the former by the 
increasing introduction of imaginary features. They were pro- 
perly distinguished by taking abstract or allegorical beings as 
their personages; and by havmg their stories purposely so con- 
structed as to convey ethical or religious lessons. 

Some of the Miracle-Plays are of a very cumbrous size and texture, 
treating all the principal events of the Bible-history, from the Crea- 
tion to the Day of Judgment. Such pieces were acted on festivals, 
the performance lasting for more days than one. There have been 

The golden stars were whirled amid their race, 
And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light ; 

When each thing, nestled in his resting-place, 
Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night : 
The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight ; 

The fearful deer of death stood not in douht ; 

The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot. 



184 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

preserved three sets of them ; the oldest of which was probably put 
together in the middle of the thirteenth century, and was acted at 
Chester, every Whitsunday, for many generations, under the super- 
intendence of the mayor of the city. Tn plays of both kinds, the 
prevalent tone is serious, and not infrequently very solemn. Not 
only, however, are the most sacred objects treated with undue 
freedom, but passages of the broadest and coarsest mirth are inter- 
spersed, apparently with the design of keeping alive the attention 
of the rude and uninstructed audience. The Moral-Plays had a 
character called Iniquity or the Vice, whose avowed function was 
buffoonery : he is alluded to by Shakspeare. Dramas of this sort, 
becoming common in England about the time of Henry the Sixth, 
were afterwards much more numerous than the Miracle-Plays, but 
without ever driving them entirely from the field. In one of the 
oldest and simplest of the Morals, the chief personage is called 
'' Every-Man," and of course represents Mankind. Being sum- 
moned by Death, he in vain endeavours to obtain, on his long jour- 
ney, the companionship of such friends as Kindred, Fellowship, 
Goods, and Good-Deeds : and he is, in the end, deserted by Knowl- 
edge, Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and Five-Wits, who had at fii'st 
consented to attend him. 

In the later middle ages, the distinction between the two kinds 
of works was often lost. Allegorical characters found their way 
into pieces which in their main outline were Miracle-Plays : and 
the Moral-Plays began to present personages who, whether histori- 
cal or invented, had no emblematic significance. 

7. We are now in a fit position for remarking the changes which 
took place after the beginning of the sixteenth century. The old 
plays, in both of their kinds, still kept their place : nor were they 
quite overthrown by the Reformation. For the Chester plays were 
publicly acted, in part at least, in the year 1577. Skelton, who has 
already become known to us, has recorded that in his younger 
days, he wrote Miracle-Plays ; and there were printed two Morali- 
ties of his, " Magnificence " and " The Necromancer." A more 
respectable contributor to the drama was the learned and pugna- 
cious protestant Bishop Bale. Obliged to fly from England on the 
fall of his first patron Cromwell, he employed some part of the 
leisure forced on him by his exile, in the composition of several 
Miracle-Plays, all of which were intended for instructing the people 
in the errors and abuses of Popery and in the distinctive tenets of 
the Reformation. Their chief merit consists in their being almost 
entirely free from the levities which degrade other works of the 
kind : and they scarcely seem, now, to possess a literary excellence 



THE INFANCY OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 185 

justifying the satisfaction they gave to their venerable author, who 
has carefully enumerated them in his own list of his works. 

There were, however, from the beginning of Henry the Eighth's 
reign, few dramas written unless in the mixed kind : and there has 
lately been discovered a work of Bale himself, which is the oldest 
extant specimen of the combination. It is a play on the history of 
" Kmg John," in which the king himself, the pope, and other per- 
sonages of the time, are associated with the old allegorical figures. 

The Mixed-Plays, from that time downwards, are commonly 
known, not inaptly, by the name of Interludes. The most cele- 
brated productions of this class and age were the plays of John 
Heywood, who, having published a series of epigrams, is usually, to 
distinguish him from a later dramatic writer, named " The Epi- 
grammatist." His Interludes deal largely in ecclesiastical satire ; 
and, not devoid of spirit or humour, they have very little either of 
skUl in character-painting, or of interest in story. One of the earliest 
among them is " A Merry Play between the Pardoner and the 
Friar, the Curate and Neighbour Pratt," which has for its principal 
theme the frauds practised by the friars, and by the sellers of indul- 
gences. In "The Four P's" the only plot is this. The Pardoner, the 
" Poticary," and the Palmer, lay a wager, to be gained by him who 
shall tell the greatest untruth. The first two recount long and 
marvellous tales, each of his own craft : and the third, who asserts 
in a single sentence that he never saw a woman lose patience, is 
adjudged by the Pedlar, the chosen umpire, to have fairly out-lied 
both of his rivals. 

It is not a loss of time to remark this dramatic feebleness and 
these stale and weak impertinences. For Heywood's life extended 
to within twenty years of the time when Shakspeare must have 
begun to write. We are still, it should seem, at a hopeless distance 
from the great master. Fortunately we need not quit our period 
without having to mark several mde steps in advance ; although it 
is necessary to anticipate a very few years of the next age, in order 
to bring all of these conveniently together. 

8. About the middle of the century, the drama extricated itself 
completely from its ancient fetters. Both Comedy and Tragedy 
had then begun to exist, not in name only, but in a rude reality. 

The author of our oldest known Comedy was Nicholas Udall, 
h. 1505. ) who was master of Eton School, and afterwards of West- 
d. 1556.]" minster, becoming, in both places, rather notorious for the 
severity of his punishments. He was a classical scholar of some 
note ; and he published a school-book, called " Flowers of Latin 
Speaking," with other Latin works. He was in part the translator of 



186 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

the Paraphrase of Erasmus on the New Testament, published under 
the patronage of Catherine Parr, the queen-dowager. He wrote 
several dramas, now lost, one of them being an English play called 
" Ezekias," which was acted before Elizabeth at Cambridge ; while 
another was a Latin play " On the Papacy," probably intended 
to be enacted by his pupils. The same may have been the destina- 
tion of the English Comedy, through which he holds his place in the 
general history of our literature. It is called " Ralph Eoister Bol- 
ster," from the name of its hero, a siUy town-rake. The misad- 
ventures of this person are represented in it with much comic force. 
The story is well conducted ; the situations are contrived dexter- 
ously ; and the dialogue, though rough in diction, and couched in an 
irregular and unmusical kind of rhyme, abounds in spirit and hu- 
mour. Its exact date is unknown ; but it was certainly written 
before the year 1557.* 

* NICHOLAS UDALL. 
From the Soliloquy with which his Comedy is opened, hy Matthew Merrygreek, 
the Tcnave of the piece. 
As long liveth the merry man (they say) 
As doth the sorry man, and longer hy a day : 
Yet the grasshopper, for all his summer piping, 
Starveth in winter with hungry griping : 
Therefore another said saw doth men advise. 
That they he together hoth merry and wise. 
This lesson must I practise ; or else, ere long, 
"With me, Matthew Merrygreek, it will he wrong. 
For know ye that, for all this merry note of mine, 
He might appose me now, that should ask where I dine. 
Sometime Lewis Loiterer biddeth me come near ; 
Sometimes Watkin Waster maketh us good cheer ; 
Sometimes I hang on Hankyn Hoddydoddy's sleeve ; 
But this day on Ralph Roister Doister's, hy his leave : 
For, truly, of all men he is my chief banker, 
Both for meat and money, and my chief sheet-anchor. 

But now of Roister Doister somewhat to express, 
That ye may esteem him after his worthiness ; 
In these twenty towns, and seek them throughout, 
Is not the like stock whereon to graft a lout. 
All the day long is he facing and craking 
Of his great acts in fighting and fray-making : 
But when Roister Doister is put to the proof. 
To keep the Queen's peace is more for his behoof. 
Hold by his yea and nay, be his white son : 
Praise and rouse him well, and ye have his heart won : 
For so well liketh he his own fond fashions. 
That he taketh pride of false commendations. 
But such sport have I with him, as I would not leese, 
Though I should be bound to live with bread and cheese. 



THE INFANCY OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 187 

Ten years afterwards, our earliest Tragedy was publicly played 
in the Inner Temple. It is known by two names, " Gorboduc " and 
" Ferrex and Porrex :" and it was probably the joint production of 
two authors, both of whom have already become known to us. 
The first three acts are said to have been written by Thomas 
Norton, the last two by Lord Buckhurst. Doubts have been ex- 
pressed as to the authorship of the former : but they do not seem 
to rest on sufficient ground; and it would be v/rong to reject 
hastily a claim to reputation, presented on behalf of one whom we 
6, 1532. ■) know to have otherwise shown literary capability, Nor- 
d. 1584. 1 ton, accordingly, may be allowed to share, with his more 
celebrated coadjutor, the honour which the authors of "Gorboduc" 
receive on two several grounds. It was the earliest tragedy in our 
language : it was the first instance in which the recent experiment 
of blank verse was applied to dramatic composition. Its story is a 
chapter from ancient British history, presentmg to us nothing but 
domestic hate and revenge, national bloodshed and calamity. The 
old king of Britain having in his lifetime shared his realm between 
his two sons, these strive for undivided sovereignty. The younger 
kills the elder, and is himself assassinated by the mother of both. 
The exasperated people exterminate the blood-stained race: and 
the country is left in desolation and anarchy. The incidents con- 
stituting the plot are very inartificially connected; and all the 
great events, instead of being directly represented in action, are 
intimated only m narrative, or in dumb shows, like those which we 
find in one or two early works of Shakspeare. Between the acts the 
story is moralized by a chorus. The dialogue is heavy, declama- 
tory, and undramatic ; and its chief merit, which is far from being 
small, lies in the stately tone of the language, no slight achieve- 
ment in a first attempt, and in the solemnly reflective tone of the 
sentiments.* 

* THOMAS SACKVILLE. 

From the Fourth Act of Gorboduc : Queen Videna's Lamentation for the death 
of her elder son. 

Why should I live, and linger forth my time 
In longer life to double my distress ? 
Oh me, most woful wight ! whom no mishap 
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence ! 

Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate, 
Have pierced this breast, and life with iron reft ! 
Or, in this palace here, where I so long 
Have spent my days, could not that happy hour 
Once, once have hapt, in which these huge frames 
With death, by fall, might have oppressed me 



188 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 



THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND. 

9. The causes which make our roll of eminent English names so 
short for this period, acted yet more strongly in Scotland ; and the 
effect was augmented by other circumstances. The most thought- 
ful and best instructed men concentrated their attention, with con- 
stant earnestness, on the theological and ecclesiastical questions of 
the time : national dangers and aristocratic feuds distracted the 
country without ceasing ; and Scottish literature, notwithstanding 
the poetic brilliancy which had recently adorned it, occupied really, 
in the beginning of this period, a position much less advanced than 
that which was the starting-point of England. 

It is impossible to avoid believing, that literary progress was 
seriously impeded by the state of the Living Language. Radi- 
cally identical with that which was spoken in the south, it had 
yet by this time assumed decisively the character of a separate dia- 
lect. It retained much more of the antique than the English did ; 
because it had not received nearly so thorough a development in 
literature, and wanted especially the cultivation which would have 
been given by a free use of literary prose. It had also contracted, 
through the provincial isolation of the country, many peculiarities, 
which were neither old Saxon nor modern English : and these were 
now receiving continual accessions. Not only, therefore, was the 
Scottish dialect a less efficient literary organ than the English; 
but, likewise, those who wrote and spoke it were not well qualified, 
either for appreciating perfectly, or for dexterously transferring to 
their own speech, the improvements in style and diction which 
were going on so actively in England. If there was ever to arise 
in Scotland a vernacular literature worthy of the name, it could be 

Or should not this most hard and cruel soil, 
So oft where I have pressed my wretched steps, 
Sometime had ruth of my accursed life. 
To rend in twain, and swallow me therein ! 

So had my bones possessed now, in peace, 
Their happy grave within the closed ground ; 
And greedy worms had gnawn this pined heart, 
Without my feeling pain. So should not now 
This living breast remain the ruthful tomb, 
Wherein my heart, yielden to death, is graved ; 
Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief, 
My doleful mind had not afflicted thus. 

Oh. my beloved son ! Oh, my sweet child ! 
My dear Ferrex, my joy, my life's delight ! 
Murdered with cruel death ! 



THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND. 189 

only through the adoption of the one or the other of two courses. 
The first of these would have consisted in a thorough cultivation, 
and enrichment, and systematizing of the native dialect ; a process 
which would have placed the two kingdoms of the island in a literary 
relation to each other, not unlike that which subsists between Spain 
and Portugal. This was a mode neither desirable nor likely. The 
other was, the adoption of the English tongue as the vehicle of the 
standard literature of Scotland. This step, which probably must 
have been, sooner or later, the issue in any circumstances, was has- 
tened by the union of the two crowns in the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century. From that date, accordingly, the literature of 
England comprehends that of the sister-country as one of its 
branches. 

The fact last noticed co-operates with others, in making it con- 
venient that this should be the last period in which we take sepa- 
rate account of Scottish literature. It will be in our power to 
learn all that needs to be known, by lookmg forward very cursorily 
to the literary events that occurred in Scotland during the reign of 
Elizabeth, and the Scottish reign of James. Even with this exten- 
sion of the period, our review of the northern literature may war- 
rantably be brief. The importance of the phenomena, in the aspect 
in which they are here regarded, was far from being commensurate 
either to the momentous character of the attendant social changes, 
to the great ability of many of the literary men, or to the extensive 
erudition that was possessed by some of them. 

10. In the annals of Scottish poetry during the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the distinguished poets of its opening years having already 
been spoken of, there occurs but one name that claims a memorial. 
The brightness which had lately shone out proved to be that of 
sunset : and the clouds of the moonless night that succeeded, 
dimmed and hid the few scattered stars. 

I. bef. 1500. ) Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, the youthful com- 
d. aft, 1567. J panion of James the Fifth, and afterwards his sagacious 
but unheeded adviser, is one of the most celebrated of Scotsmen, in 
his native country at least. His fame rests securely on the evi- 
dence of natural vigour which his works display, and on our knowl- 
edge of the influence which these had in promoting the ecclesiasti- 
cal changes that began to be contemplated in his day. But very 
warm national partialities would be required, for enabling us to 
assign him a high rank as a poet. The chief characteristics of his 
writings are, their sagacious closeness of observation, their rough 
business-like common-sense, and their formidable and unscrupulous 



190 THE AGE OP THE REFORMATION. 

vehemence of sarcastic invective. Living in a licentious court, 
and under a corrupt church, he attacks, with equal freedom, the 
follies and vices of the king and his comrades, and the abuses and 
weaknesses which deformed the ecclesiastical establishment. 

His most elaborate work is called " The Satire of the Three 
EvStates," a title which correctly describes it as aimed at a very- 
wide range of victims. It is a drama of huge dimensions, and the 
earliest work of the kind that exists in the northern dialect. It is 
not so strictly a Moral- Play as an Interlude, bearing a considerable 
resemblance to the works of John Heywood. It abounds in such 
allegoric personages as King Humanity, Flattery, Falsehood, and 
Good Counsel, Chastity and Sensuality, Spirituality and Temporal- 
ity, Diligence and Correction, the latter of whom hangs Theft in 
presence of the spectators. These figures, however, mix familiarly, 
in the scene, with characters representing directly the classes of the 
community. Among them is the Friar, who is Flattery in dis- 
guise ; there is the Doctor, who delivers a pretty long sermon, 
answered in another, which is recited by Folly ; there are the 
Bishop, Abbot, Parson, Prioress, and Pardoner ; and the low comedy 
of the piece is played chiefly by the Shoemaker and Tailor, and 
the wives of these two. The date of the composition is conjectured 
to have been the year 1535, when it was acted at Cupar, in Fife, 
the native county of the author. The grossness of the humour, in 
many passages, is not surpassed by any thing in our old literatm-e : 
and the satirical exposure of corruptions, though mainly made at 
the expense of the church, (for which, by that time, the rulers pro- 
bably cared little,) cuts hkewise so deeply into political questions, 
that the toleration of the exhibition by the government is almost as 
great a riddle as that which was shown to Skelton. It is needless 
to say that, in the controversial design of Lindsay's drama, we have 
a parallel to those pieces which were offered to uneducated au- 
diences in England by the venerable Bishop Bale. 

Our Scottish poet was certainly not endowed largely, either with 
poetic imagination or fine susceptibility. The allegorical inven- 
tfons of the " Satire" have no great originality or beauty. His 
other large work, " The Monarchy, a Dialogue betwixt Experience 
and a Courtier," is a vast historical summary, with very little to 
relieve its dulness : and his " Squire Meldrum," in which a con- 
temporary gentleman is promoted to be the hero of a metrical 
romance, is, besides its gratuitous uidecency, conclusive as a proof 
of the author's inability to rise into the imaginative and romantic 
sphere. He is much stronger in those smaller pieces which open 



THE LITERATUEE OF SCOTLAND. 191 

up to him his favourite field of satire. The most poetical of these 
is " The Complaint of the Papingo," in which the king's parrot 
reads a lesson both to the court and to the clergy. 

On the whole, Lindsay certainly wanted that creative power of 
genius, which would have entitled him to the name adopted, in the 
golden age of Scottish poetry, by the masters of the art. Dunbar 
and his contemporaries called themselves Makers: and this was 
also an English use of the term till the close of Elizabeth's reign. 
The poet of the Eeformation in Scotland was not a poetic maker : 
he was only a man of great robustness, both of thought and will, 
who acted powerfully on a rude and fierce generation. 

11. Down to the end of the last period in which we examined 
the intellectual progress of Scotland, we did not discover any appli- 
cation of the living tongue in the shape of origmal Prose to uses 
that can be called literary. This great step was now taken. Still, 
however, the most distinguished relics of Scottish prose that belong- 
to the first half of the sixteenth century are not original. They 
were versions from the Latin by John BeUenden, archdeacon of 
Moray, who had also contemporary fame as a poet. He translated, 
with more neatness and variety of phrase than might have been 
expected, and with evidence of highly competent scholarship, the 
first Five Books of Livy, and the History of Scotland recently 
written by Boece. In the year 1548 there was printed, at Saint 
Andrews, a monument of Scottish prose which is still more curious. 
This piece, " The Complaint of Scotland," is a series of satirical 
reflections on the state of the country, enlivened by a great deal of 
quaint fancy ; and it possesses much value for the antiquary, not 
only through its minute illustrations of manners and sentiment, but 
as abounding in characteristically provincial words and phrases. 
The promise of further progress is held out by the title of a later 
book. The Chronicles of Scotland, written by Robert Lindsay of 
Pitscottie, and extending from the accession of James the Second 
to the middle of the reign of Mary. But the literary pretensions of 
this prolix, credulous, and undigested record, are not higher than 
those of the poorest English chronicles of the middle ages. There 
is quoted from it, in one of the notes to Marmion, a passage where 
the writer relates, with implicit belief, the story of the apparition 
which, in the church of LinHthgow, warned James the Fourth before 
the fatal battle of Flodden. 

The few other names which have to be selected from the annals 
of Scottish prose, belong to the celebrated men who acted m the 
great struggles of the Reformation : and the position which these 



192 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

held, requires us to note the state of erudition in the country from 
the beginning of the century. 

Scotland possessed, in this period, two men very eminent in the 
history of scholastic learning. Probably there was not then in 
England any speculative philosopher comparable to Major : there 
was certainly no classical scholar accomplished so variously and so 
exactly as Buchanan. Yet the general progress of Scottish erudi- 
tion was slower than in the south ; and its benefits were much 
less widely diffused. The most learned men were partly or alto- 
gether educated abroad. 

The honour of havmg been the first Scotsman who wrote Latin toler- 
ably, has been assigned to Hector Boece, who, about the year 1500, 
resigned an academical appointment in France to become principal 
of the college newly founded at Aberdeen. His most famous work, 
the "History of the Scots," is good, though not faultless, as a specimen 
of Latinity : the student of antiquity now remembers it only as a re- 
ceptacle for the wildest of the fables which used to be authorita- 
tively current as the earliest sections m our national annals. 

Much inferior to Boece's writings in correctness of Latinity, in- 
h. ab. 1470. "I ^^^^d painfully clumsy and inelegant, are those of John 
d. ab. 1550. j Mair or Major, who, however, was one of the most 
vigorous thinkers of his time. Educated in England and Paris, and 
teaching for some time in France, he became the head of one of the 
colleges in Saint Andrews. His greatest works are metaphysical : 
and these, now utterly neglected, like others of their times and 
kind, fully vindicate the fame which he enjoyed, as one of the most 
acute and original of those who taught and defended, in its last 
stages, the scholastic philosophy of the middle ages. His " His- 
tory of the Nation of the Scots" has little reputation among modern 
historical students : but, both there and elsewhere, he exhibits an 
independence and liberality of opinion, which, it has been believed, 
were not without influence on his most famous pupils. He was the 
teacher of Knox and Buchanan. 

12. The first of these great names is not to be forgotten in the 
record of Scottish learning and talent. But the stern apostle of 
the northern Reformation had his mind fixed steadfastly on ob- 
jects infinitely more sacred than either fame or knowledge: and 
h. 1505. 1 Knox's few published writings, although plainly indicating 
d. 1572. ]■ both his force of character and his vigour of intellect, are 
chiefly valuable in their bearmg on the questions of his time. The 
most elaborate of them, and the only one that can be described as 
anything more than a controversial or religious tract, is his " His- 



THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND. 193 

tory of the Reformation of Religion within the Reahn of Scotland." 
Those who now read this interesting chronicle, and who think that 
its language is peculiarly Scottish, may be amused by knowing, 
that Knox's style was reproached by one of his controversial oppo- 
nents with being affectedly and unpatriotically English. 
h 1506 1 Greorge Buchanan, less deeply immersed in the vortex of 
d. 1582. J the times, and enjoying, in more than one stage of his life, 
the benefits of academical seclusion, found time to earn for himself 
a fame which can never be lost, unless the revival of learning in 
Europe should be followed by a total loss of all preceding memo- 
rials of civilisation. He is admitted, by those who most keenly 
dislike his ecclesiastical and political opinions, to have been not 
only a man of eminent and versatile genius, but one of the finest 
and most correct classical scholars that ever appeared in Christen- 
dom. There have been Latinists more deeply versed in the phi- 
losophy of the language, and others more widely informed in the 
knowledge to which it is the clue ; but hardly, perhaps, has there 
been, since the fall of Rome, any one who has written Latin with 
an excellence so complete and uniform. The chief of his Prose 
Works are his History of Scotland, and his Treatise on the Con- 
stitution of the Kingdom. The former, certainly the work of a 
partisan, is nevertheless historically important ; the latter is re- 
markable for the manly independence of its opinions : and both of 
them tell their tale with an antique dignity and purity, which the 
Roman tongue has seldom been made to wear by a modern pen. 
The merit of his Latin Poems is yet higher. They are justly de- 
clared to unite, more than any other < ompositions of their kind, 
originality of matter with classic elegance of style. The most 
famous of them is his Translation of the Psalms ; besides which, 
the list includes satires, didactic verses, and lyrics, one of these 
being the exquisite Ode on the month of May. 

After the great name of Buchanan, a poor show is made by that 
of Bishop Lesley, the friend and defender of the unfortunate and 
misguided queen : yet he, too, was no mean scholar, and no bad 
Latin writer. Much more learned, probably, was Ninian Winzet. 
another advocate of the old creed, who had to seek refuge in the 
southern regions of the continent. A scholar more distinguished 
than either of them withdrew himself very soon from innovation 
and turmoil, and closed his days peacefully as a teacher in France. 
This was Florence Wilson, who translates his name into Volusenus 
in the Latin treatise, " On Tranquillity of Mind," which has pre- 
served his name with high honour among those who take interest 
in classical studies. 



194 THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 

In closing our separate record of northern literature, we must go 
forward a little to notice, as having been really eminent both for 
scholarship and talent, the energetic and restless Andrew Melville, 
the founder of the Presbyterian polity of the Scottish Church. 

We must also mark how, the University of Saint Andrews hav- 
ing been established first of aU, the other academical institutions of 
the country arose before the close of the sixteenth century. That 
of Glasgow dates from 1450 ; King's College m Aberdeen, from 
1494 ; the University of Edinburgh was founded by King James 
in 1582, and Marischal College of Aberdeen in 1593. Still more 
important, perhaps, was the foundation which was now laid for a 
system of popular education in Scotland. There had long been, 
in the towns, grammar-schools where Latia was taught. The estab- 
lishment of schools throughout the country was proposed by the 
Reformed clergy in 1560, the very year in which Parliament sanc- 
tioned the Reformation ; and the principle was again laid down, a 
few years later, in the Second Book of Discipline. A considerable 
number of parochial schools were founded before King James's re- 
moval to England ; and the setting down of a school in each parish, 
if it were possible, was ordered for the first time by an Act of the 
Privy Council, issued in 1616, and ratified by Parliament in 1633. 



THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 195 



CHAPTER III. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

Elizabeth, 1558-1603. I The Commonwealth, 1649-1653. 

James I., 1603-1625. | The Protectorate, 1653-1660. 

Charles L, 1625-1649. i 

SECTION FIRST : GENERAL VIEW OF THE PERIOD. 

Introduction. 1. The Early Years of Elizabeth's Eeign — Summary of 
their Literature. — 2. Literary Greatness of the next Eighty Years — 
Division into Four Eras. — Eeign of Elizabeth fkom 1580. 3. Social 
Character of the Time — Its Eeligious Aspect — Effects on Literature. — 4. 
Minor Elizabethan Writers — Their Literary Importance — The Three 
Great Names. — 5. The Poetry of Spenser and Shakspeare — The Eloquence 
of Hooker. — Eeign of James. 6. Its Social and Literary Character — 
Distinguished Names — Bacon — Theologians — Poets. — The Two follow- 
ing Eras. 7. Political and Ecclesiastical Changes — Effects on Thinking 
— Effects on Poetry — Milton's Youth. — 8. Moral Aspect of the Time — 
Effects on Literatm'e. — Eeign of Charles. 9. Literary Events — Poetry 
— Eloquence — Theologians — Erudition. — The Commonwealth and Pro- 
tectorate. 10. Literary Events — Poetry Checked — Modem Symptoms 
— Philosophy— Hobbes — Theology — Hall, Taylor, and Baxter. — 11. Elo- 
quence — Milton's Prose Works — Modern Symptoms — Style of the Old 
English Prose Writers. 

INTRODUCTION. 

1. The era which is now to open on our view, is the most brilliant 
in the literary history of England. Thought, and imagination, 
and eloquence, combine to illuminate it with their most dazzling 
light ; its literature assumes the most various forms, and expatiates 
over the most distant regions of speculation and invention ; and its 
intellectual chiefs, while they breathe the sphit of modern knowledge 
and freedom, speak to us in tones which borrow an irregular state- 
liness from the chivalrous past. But the magnificent panorama 
does not meet the eye at once, as a scenic spectacle is displayed on 
the rising of the curtain. Standing at the point which we have now 



196 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

reached, we must wait for the unveilmg of its features, as we should 
watch whUe the mists of dawn, shrouding a beautiful landscape, 
melt away before the morning sun. 

Our period covers a century. But the first quarter of it was very 
unproductive in all departments of literature : it was much more so 
than the age that had just closed. Of the poets, and philosophers, 
and theologians, who have immortalized the name of Queen Eliza- 
beth, hardly one was born so much as five years before she ascended 
the throne. 

In whatever direction we look during the first half of her reign, 
we discover an equal inaptitude, among men of letters, to build on 
the foundations that had been laid in the generation before. A 
respectable muster-roll of literary names could not be collected from 
those twenty or twenty-five years, unless it were to include a few 
of those writers who, properly belonging to the preceding time, 
continued to labour in this. 

In poetry, the Mirror of Magistrates continued merely to heap up 
bad verses. The miscellaneous collection, called " The Paradise of 
Dainty Devices," contains hardly any pieces that are above medio- 
crity; and old Tusser's "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," 
though Southey has thought it worthy of republication, teaches 
agriculture in verse, but does not aim at making it poetical. It is 
only towards the end of this interregnum of genius, that we reach 
something of poetical promise ; and then we have only " The Steel 
Glass " of Gascoigne, a tolerable satirical poem in indifferent blank 
verse, with some smaller poems of his which are more lively. 

The drama lingered in the state in which Udall and Sackville left 
it, tni about the very time of Shakspeare's youth. Even its best 
writers deserve but slight commendation. Edwards, however, who 
hardly unproved the art at all, was the best of the contributors 
to the " Paradise ;" and Gascoigne the satirist, though merely a 
dramatic translator, not only used blank verse in tragic dialogue, 
but wrote our earliest prose comedy. John Still, who in maturer 
age became a bishop, composed the best of the original comedies, 
" Gammer Gurton's Needle ;" which, however, is in every way in- 
ferior to " Eoister Doister." 

In English prose, again, the time was equally barren. Its repu- 
tation is redeemed by one great event only; the appearance of 
the Bishops' Bible, which will soon be commemorated more parti- 
cularly. Of original writers, it possessed none that are generally 
remembered, except the venerable Bishop Jewell. But the " Apo- 
logy for the Church of England," the most celebrated work of this 
learned, able, and pious man, was written in Latin. We must not, 



BACON, AND MILTON. 197 

however, forget Stow's unpretending Clironicles of England and 
Survey of London ; and the readers of Shakspeare may be reminded, 
that to these obscure years belong the plain but useful historical 
works of Hall and Holinshed, of which he made so free use. 

Learning in the ancient tongues, which had received a check 
during the ecclesiastical troubles, was now allowed to resume its 
course. The oriental languages were studied sufficiently to give 
great aid to the scriptural critics and translators. But classical 
knowledge, which is said to have declined almost everywhere in 
the latter half of the century, produced in England no very valuable 
fruits. Its first effect was, the setting afloat a shoal of metrical 
translations from the Latin poets, with some from the Greek. 
These were very far from being useless. They not only diffused a 
taste for the antique, but served as convenient manuals for some of 
the less instructed among the later poets ; Shakspeare himself being, 
in all likelihood, not slow to appropriate their treasures. But, as 
specimens either of style or of poetry, they are, one and aU, exceed- 
ingly bad. 

2. The writers being thus finally disposed of, who appeared in 
the first half of Elizabeth's long reign, our inquiries must dwell very 
particularly on those by whom they were succeeded. The immense 
and invaluable series of literary works, which embellished the period 
now in question, might be regarded as begianing with Spenser's 
earliest poem, which was published in the year 1579. 

" There never was, anywhere, anything like the sixty or seventy 
years that elapsed from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the Ees- 
toration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither 
the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo 
the Tenth, or of Louis the Fourteenth, can come at aU into compar- 
ison. For, in that short period, we shall fimd the names of almost 
all the very great men that this nation has ever produced ; the 
names of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney, of 
Raleigh, and Hooker, and Taylor, of Napier, and Milton, and Cud- 
worth, and Hobbes, and many others ; men, aU of them, not merely 
of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach 
of understanding, and of minds truly creative and original ; not men 
who perfected art by the delicacy of their taste, or digested know- 
ledge by the justness of their reasonmgs ; but men who made vast 
and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and 
reason must hereafter be employed, and who enlarged, to an incred- 
ible and unparalleled extent, both the stores and the resources of 
the human faculties." * 

* Lord Jeffrey : Contributions to the Edinburgh Eeview ; "Vol. II. 



198 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

No age in our literature deserves to be studied so deeply, as that 
which, in respect of its innate power of thought and invention, is 
thus justly ranked above the most brilliant eras of ancient Greece 
and Eome, of modern Italy and France. Nor, when we survey that 
energetic period from its beginning to its close, do we discover any 
point at which its activity can be said, with truth, to have either 
ceased or flagged. Impediments thrown up in one channel of 
thought, served only to drive the current forward with redoubled 
impetuosity in another. Some of the highest minds, indeed, lingered 
on earth till the bounds of their time were past, casting the shadow 
of their strength on the feebler age that followed. Allied, likewise, 
so closely, by the originality and vigour which was common to aU, 
the leaders of our golden age of letters were linked together not less 
firmly by the common spirit and tone of their works. Let us look 
in what direction we will ; to theology or philosophy, to the di'ama, 
or the narrative poem, or the ever-shifting shapes of the lyric : 
everywhere there meets us, in the midst of boundless dissimilitude 
imprinted by individual genius and temperament, a similarity of 
general characteristics as striking as if it had been transmitted with 
the blood. The great men of that great age, separated from their 
predecessors by a gap in time, and distinguished from them yet 
more clearly by their intellectual character, stand aloof, quite as 
decidedly, from those degenerate successors, amidst whom a few of 
them moved in the latest stages of their course. Taylor, and HaU, 
and Baxter, are pupils who learned new lessons in the school which 
had nurtm*ed Hooker ; Hobbes might be called, without injustice 
to either party, the philosophical step-son and heir of Bacon ; and 
Milton is the last survivor of the priacely race, whose intellectual 
founders were Spenser and Shakspeare. 

While the period thus spoken of, reaching from about 1580 to 
1660, must be treated as one, it wiU not be supposed to have been 
void of changes. Eighty years could not have passed along, in one 
of the most actively thinking ages of the world, without evolving 
much that was novel ; still less could this have happened in a time 
when revolutions, political and religious, were bursting out like vol- 
canoes, and when aU the relations of society were, more than once, 
utterly metamorphosed. 

Accordingly, we cannot thoroughly understand the intellectual 
phenomena that arose, unless we begin our scrutiny by regarding 
them in their order of succession ; and the spirit which prevailed 
in public affairs communicated itself sufficiently to literature, to 
make the changes of dynasty represent, in a loose way, the succes- 
sive changes which took place in the realm of letters. We will 



BACON, AND MILTON. 199 

hastily examine, one after another, the latter half of Elizabeth's 
reign, the reign of James, that of Charles, and the few years of the 
Commonwealth and Protectorate. 



THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH FROM 1580. 

3. It is not easy to detect aU the impulses, which made the last 
generation of the sixteenth century so strong in itself, and capable 
of bequeathing so much strength to those who took up its inheri- 
tance. 

The chivalrous temper of the middle ages was not yet extinct. 
But it had begun to seek for more useful fields of exercise when it 
animated the half-piratical adventurers, who roamed the seas of the 
west in search of new worlds, and fame, and gold ; and it burned 
with a purer flame in Queen Elizabeth's foreign wars, blazing up 
with a mingled burst of patriotic and religious zeal when the shores 
of England were threatened by the terrible fleet of the Spaniards, 
There was an expanding elasticity, a growing freedom, both of 
thought and of action ; a freedom which was very imperfect accord- 
ing to modern views, but which still was much wider than any that 
had yet, unless for very short intervals, been enjoyed by the nation. 
There was an increasing national prosperity, with a correspondmg 
advance of comfort and refinement throughout all ranks of society. 
Ancient literature became directly familiar to a few, and at second 
hand to very many ; a knowledge of such science as Europe then 
possessed began to be zealously desired by educated men; and 
there was difiused, widely, an acquaintance with the history and 
relations of other countries. 

Mightier than all these forces in outward show, and strong in its 
slow and silent working on the hearts of the nation, was the influ- 
ence exerted by the Reformation, which, now completed, had 
moulded the polity of the English Church into the form it was 
destined to retain. More gentle than the gales that blew from the 
new-found islands of the ocean, was the spirit which pure religion 
breathed, or should have breathed, over the face of society ; and 
tenfold more welcome was, or should have been, the voice that an- 
nounced freedom of spiritual thought, than the loudest blast with 
which a herald's trumpet ever ushered in a proclamation of civil 
liberty. It cannot be doubted that the ecclesiastical revolution, 
which was so peacefully effected by Elizabeth, was felt, by the 
nation at large, like the removal of an oppressive weight. But we 
must not aUow ourselves to imagine, either that perfect religious 
freedom was now gained ; or that the old faith vanished from the 



200 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

land as a snow-wreath melts before the warmth of spring ; or that 
the purification of doctrine and discipline transformed the hearts 
and minds of a whole people with the suddenness of a sorcerer's 
chafm. 

In the deliverance out of the ancient prison-house, the captives 
carried with them some of the ancient fetters. This took place 
partly because the strong-willed sovereign so decreed it, partly be- 
cause it could not well have been otherwise. If Elizabeth sternly 
suppressed the dissent of her Catholic subjects, she prevented, with 
a hand equally heavy, all departure of Protestants from the ecclesi- 
astical polity which she had established ; and, in church as in state, 
her prudent mixture of forbearance with severity checked the 
growth, as well as curbed the manifestation, of discontents which 
were to be aggravated into destructive violence by the bigotry and 
folly of her successors. In regard to the matters in which we are 
immediately interested, the great queen's policy, and the state of 
doctrine during the greater part of her time, concurred in having 
this effect ; that puritanism has not in any shape a place in literary 
history till we reach the reign of James. Literature was affected in 
a different way by the somewhat doubtful state of opinion and 
feeling which is traceable among the people. The cautious and 
moderate character of the ecclesiastical changes, while it facilitated 
the gradual absorption of the whole community into the bosom of 
the reformed church, saved all men from that abrupt breaking up 
of settled associations, and that severe antagonism of feeling between 
the old and the new, which another course of events had caused in 
Scotland. It is certain that the effects which this state of things 
produced in literature, and most of all in poetry, were, in the mean- 
time at least, highly beneficial. The poets, speaking to the nation, 
and themselves inhaling its spirit, had thus at their command a rich 
fund of ideas and sentiments, passing in an uninterrupted series from 
the past into the present. The picturesqueness of the middle ages, 
and their chivalry, and their superstitions, still awakened in every 
breast an echo more or less loud and clear ; and the newly revealed 
spiritual world, which was gradually diffusing its atmosphere all 
around, communicated, even to those who were unconscious whence 
the prompting came, enlarged vigour and independence of thought, 
and novel and elevating objects of aspiration. Nor was the morality 
of the time, whatever may be our ethical judgment on it, less favour- 
able to the progress of literary culture. It was neither lofty nor 
ascetic, but neither was it generally impure : it was, like the man- 
ners, seldom refined ; but, like these, it was coarse in tone rather 
than bad in essence. It was better than that which had prevailed in 



BACON, AND MILTON. 201 

the early part of the century ; and, unfortunately, that of the time 
which succeeded was much worse. 

It is a question which tempts to wide conjectures, what the re- 
sults might have been if the social and ecclesiastical relations of 
England had been guided into another channel ; what might have 
happened, in the progress of literature or in that of the nation, if, 
for example, the people had been trained in such a school as that, 
of which the short reign of Edward the Sixth held out the promise ; 
if they had been taught by a press subjected to no restrictions, and 
guided by a clergy from whom puritanism inherited its doctrines 
and its spirit. Probably Charles the First would not have been 
dethroned ; but probably, likewise, neither Shakspeare nor Spenser 
would have written. 

4. The adventurers who flocked into the tourney-field of letters, 
during the last half of Elizabeth's reign, are a host whom it would 
take hours to muster. Their writings range over the whole circle 
of knowledge and invention, and give anticipations, both in prose 
and in verse, of almost every variety which literature has since dis- 
played; and, although a few only of the vast number of works 
have gained wide and enduring celebrity, there are among them a 
good many, which, if seldom read, are known sufficiently to keep 
alive the names of the authors. 

The minor writers of that age deserve much greater honour than 
they are wont to receive. The labours of several of them are really 
not less important than those of their most celebrated contempora- 
ries, as facts in the intellectual history of our nation. In some de- 
partments, indeed, the smaU men worked more signal improvements 
than the great ones ; and, everywhere, the credit which is usually 
monopolized by the one class, should in justice be shared with the 
other. Were it not for the drama and the chivalrous epic, it might 
be said that the less distinguished authors of that generation were 
the earliest builders of the structure of English literature. Others 
coming after them reared the edifice higher, and decked it with 
richer ornament : but the rustic basement is as essential a part of 
the pile, as are the porticos and columns that support its roof. Had 
it not been for the experiments which were tried by such men, and 
the promptings and warnings which their example furnished, their 
successors could not have efiected what they did. 

Further, the social and intellectual character of the last genera- 
tion in the sixteenth century descended, in great part, to the race 
that followed it. Those to whom the men of letters addressed 
themselves in the reign of James, could not have been qualified to 
respond to then* appeals, if they had not been the sons of those 

i2 



202 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

who had so strongly acted and thought and felt in the time of 
Elizabeth. 

Therefore, even although the most distinguished names of that 
earlier time had been wantmg, it would not be either unjust or in- 
correct to speak, as we often do, of the whole mass of our literature 
down to the Commonwealth, as belonging to the EUzabethan Age. 
Yet to her time belong strictly no more than three of the great 
men of our period. Its intellectual chiefs were Spenser, Shakspeare, 
and Hooker : and, it must now be said on the other side, if these 
had stood literally alone, they would suffice to vindicate for the 
reign of the masculine queen its right to be described as the most 
illustrious era in our intellectual annals. 

When we have read the names of those three celebrated men, and 
have noted the time in which they lived, we know when it was that 
English poetry rose to its culminatmg point, in style as well as in 
matter; and we know also when it was that English eloquence, 
though still imperfect in language, spoke, from one mouth at least, 
with a majesty which it has never since surpassed. 

That the poetical art should be developed more quickly than 
other departments of literature, is a circumstance which, after our 
study of earlier periods, we should be quite prepared to expect. 
The nation grows like the man : it nourishes imagination and pas- 
sion before reflective thought is matured ; and it creates and appre- 
ciates poetry, whUe history seems uninteresting, and philosophy 
is unknown. All languages, also, are fully competent for express- 
ing the complex manifestations of fancy and emotion, long before 
they become fit for precisely denoting general truths, or recording 
correctly the results of analysis ; and, yet further, all of them can 
move freely when supported by the leading-strings of verse, although 
their gait might still be uncertain and awkward if, prose being 
adopted, the guidmg hand were taken away. Here, indeed, it should 
be remembered, that, in these, the latest stages in the development 
of the English tongue, a high degree of excellence in prose style 
followed, more quickly than is usual, on the perfecting of the lan- 
guage for metrical uses. 

5. Our two immortal poets must be studied more closely here- 
after : a few points only may here conveniently be premised. 

The Faerie Queene of Spenser, and the Dramas of Shakspeare, 
are possessions for all time : yet they wear, strikingly and charac- 
teristically, features imprinted on them by the age in which they 
were conceived. Their inventors stood on a frontier-ground, which, 
while it lay within the bounds of the new moral kingdom, and 
commanded a prospect over its nearest scenes of regular and culti- 



BACON, AND MILTON. 203 

vated beauty, yet also enabled them to look backward on the past, 
and to catch vivid, glimpses of its wild magnificence. Both of them 
were possessed by thoughts, and feelings, and images, which could not 
have arisen if they had lived either a century later or as much earher. 
Yet the attention of the two was chiefly fixed on different objects : 
and very dissimilar were their views of man and history, of natm'e 
and art. Spenser's eye dwelt, with fond and untiring admiration, 
on the gorgeous scenery which covered the elfin-land of knight- 
hood and romance : present realities passed before him unseen, or 
were remembered only to be woven insensibly into the gossamer- 
tissue of fantasy ; and, lost in his life-long dream of antique gran- 
deur and ideal loveliness, he was blind to all the phenomena of that 
renovated world, which was rising around him out of the ancient 
chaos. He was the Last Minstrel of Chivahy : he was greater, 
beyond comparison, than the greatest of his forerunners ; but still 
he was no more than the modem poet of the remote past. Shak- 
speare was emphatically the poet of the present and the future. 
He knew antiquity well, and meditated on it deeply, as he did on 
aU things: the historical glories of England received an added 
majesty from his hands; and the heroes of Greece and Eome rose 
to imaginative life at his bidding. But to him the middle ages, not 
less than the classical times, were unveiled in their true light : he 
saw in them fallen fragments on which men were to build anew, 
august scenes of desolation whose ruin taught men to work more 
wisely : he painted them as the accessory features and distant land- 
scape of colossal pictures, in whose foreground stood figm-es soaring 
beyond the limits of their place ; figures instinct with the spirit of 
the time in which the poet lived, yet lifted out of and above then- 
time by the impulse of potent genius, prescient of momentous 
truths that still lay slumbering in the bosom of futurity. 

By the side of the Poetry, in wliich those celebrated men took the 
lead, the contemporary Prose shows poorly, with the one great 
exception. For, in respect of style. Hooker really stands almost 
alone in his own time, and might be said to do so though lie were 
compared with his successors. His majestic sweep of thought has 
its parallels : his command of illustration was often surpassed : both 
as a thinker and as an expounder of thought, this distinguished 
man is but one among several. But he used the words of his 
native tongue with a skill and judgment, and wove them into sen- 
tences with a harmonious fulness and a frequent approach to com- 
plete symmetry of structure, which are alike above the-character of 
English style as it was next to be developed, and marvellous when 



204 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

we remember that he may fauiy be held to have been the first in 
our illustrious train of great prose writers. 

Hooker's " Ecclesiastical Polity" was printed in the year 1594. 
Sir Philip Sidney's " Arcadia" had been written before 1587 : and 
in 1596 appeared Bacon's "Essays" and the "View of Ireland" by 
the poet Spenser. But none of these are comparable in style to 
the roll of Hooker's sentences. Sidney is loose and clumsy in con- 
struction; Bacon is stiff in his forms, and somewhat affectedly 
antique in diction : and Spenser's prose is in all respects vigorous 
rather than polished. But, the value of the matter of the books 
being at present out of question, none of these entitle us to do 
more than assert, that, before the close of the sixteenth century, 
there were a few men who wrote English prose very much more 
regularly and easily than it had been written before, and that their 
style is less cumbrous and pedantic than that of the most famous 
writers who followed. 

In a word, the application of the English language to Metrical 
composition may be held to have been perfected by Shakspeare. 
It would be hard to discover any improvements which, in this use, 
it has received since his time. The moulding of it into Prose 
forms had proceeded so far, that, though its development had here 
stopped, it would have been fuUy adequate for expressing all 
varieties of thought with perfect perspicuity and great \agour. 
But there was still much to be done, before English Prose could 
satisfy the requirements of an exactly critical taste. We must 
remember the real imperfections of style, both in our study of these 
writers, and when we pass to those of the next generation ; because we 
are in constant danger of being blinded to them, by the fascination 
of the eloquence displayed in the books in which they are contained. 

THE REIGN OF JAMES THE FIRST. 

6. The reign of Elizabeth, as we have learned, gave the key-note 
to all the literature of the next sixty years. Yet, amidst the 
general harmony with which the strains succeed each other, there 
break in, not infrequently, clanging discords. 

The literary works which belong to this succeeding part of the 
period, not only were much more numerous, but really stand, if 
they are regarded in the mass, higher than those which closed the 
sixteenth century. Spenser was unimitated, and Shakspeare inimi- 
table : but the drama itself, which, in this generation as in the last, 
monopolized nearly all the best endowed minds, received new and 
interesting developments ; and other kinds of poetry were em-iched 



BACON, AND MILTON. 205 

beyond precedent. Prose writing, on the other hand, blossomed 
into a harvest of eloquence, unexampled alike in its irregular vigom* 
and in its rich amount. 

Under the rule of James, learning was exact enough to do good 
service both in classics and theology : and it became so fashionable, 
as to infect English writing with a prevalent eruption of pedantic 
affectations. The chivalrous temper was rapidly on the wane : few 
men were actuated by it ; and those who were so, found themselves 
out of place. The last survivor of Elizabeth's devoted knights died 
on the scaffold : and the chancellor of the kingdom, the greatest 
thinker of his day, was found guilty of corruption. In the palace and 
its precincts, the old coarseness had begun to pass into positive licen- 
tiousness: and a moral degeneracy, propagated yet more widely, 
began to shed its poison on the lighter kinds of literature. The 
church possessed many good and able men ; but events of various 
kinds were bringing dissent to the surface. The civil polity stood 
apparently firm ; but it was really undermined already, and about 
to totter and fall. 

A few names, distinctively belonging to James's reign, may serve 
to illustrate its iatellectual characteristics. Bacon, the great pilot 
of modern science, then gave to the world the rudunents of his 
philosophy : the venerable Camden was perhaps too learned to be 
accepted as a fair representative of the erudition of his day. Bishop 
Hall, then beginning to be eminent, exemphfies, favourably, not only 
the eloquence and talent of the clergy, but the beginniags of resist- 
ance to the proceedings and tendencies by which the Church was 
soon to be overthrown. The drama was headed by Ben Jonson, a 
semi-classic in taste, and honourably severe in morals; and by 
Beaumont and Fletcher, luxuriating in irregularity of dramatic 
forms, and heralding the licentiousness which soon corrupted the 
art generally. From the crowd of poets who filled other fields, we 
may single out Donne, both as very distinguished for native genius, 
and as having been the main instrument in the introduction of fan- 
tastic eccentricities into poetical composition. 

THE EEIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST : THE COMMONWEALTH 
AND PROTECTORATE. 

7. The public events which took place in the last two sections 
of our period run gradually into each other, so as to make the suc- 
cessive stages not distinctly separable. Charles the First ceased to 
reign, long before he laid down his head on the block ; and, while 
he still occupied the throne, the measures of his chief advisers, 
urged with impotent imprudence, and aggravated by royal perfidy. 



206 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, 

had already separated the nation into two great parties, opposed to 
each other both pohtically and ecclesiastically. Strafford alarmed 
patriotic statesmen into rebellion : Laud goaded conscientious re- 
ligionists into secession from the Church. 

The battle of sects and factions began, at the earliest opportunity, 
to be fought with the pen as well as the sword : and many of the 
ablest men on both sides spent their strength, and forfeited their 
claim to enduring reputation, in ceaseless and now-forgotten con- 
troversies. But the momentous questions which were then openly 
agitated, for the first time in the modem history of England, pro- 
duced not a little fruit that was destined to be lasting. Sound 
constitutional principles, hitherto but insinuated by any who nou- 
rished them, were broadly avowed and convtacingly taught, not in 
parhament only and in the war of pamphlets, but in histories and 
dissertations designed, and some of them not unworthy, to descend 
to posterity. Dissenters from the church, able at length both to 
acknowledge their convictions and to defend them, wrote and spoke 
with a force of reasoning and of eloquence, which speedily converted 
the nickname of Puritans into an epithet which, though it might 
imply dislike, yet no longer justified contempt. Nor, v/hUe the 
struggle lasted, did the hierarchy or the throne want champions 
brave or pious, learned in books or skilful in argument. On both 
sides, and in all the chief sections into which the successive changes 
parted the nation, there emerged an admirable strength of intellect 
and a wide fertility of resom-ces : the minds of men caught an en- 
thusiastic fervour from the fiery atmosphere in which they breathed ; 
and some of the most eloquent writings in the English language 
had their birth, or the prompting that first inspired their authors, 
amidst the convulsions of the Civil War, or in the strangely per- 
plexed era of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. 

What has now been said, however, bears almost wholly on prose 
literature. Poetry was, and could not but be, differently affected. 
The storm which desolates a nation divided against itself, furnishes 
themes which, unfortunately for the credit of hiunan nature, are 
peculiarly powerful instruments in the hands of poets who look 
back on the tempest after it has blown over : but its real hateful- 
ness appears sufficiently from this fact alone, that it withers all 
poetic flowers that attempt to bud whRe it rages in the air. English 
poetry drooped, by necessity, ever after the breaking out of the poli- 
tical troubles. Nor was the serious temper which afterwards, for a 
while, ruled the majority of the nation, calculated to form a good 
school for the nurture of a new race of poets. It was too keenly ex- 
clusive, too fiercely controversial, too gloomily ascetic, to leave free 



BACON, AND MILTON. 207 

room for the play of ideal fancy and benignant sympathy. That 
stern era did, no doubt, mould into an awful thoughtfulness, which 
might not otherwise have dwelt on it, the mind of one man gifted 
with extraordinary genius. But, although Milton, m all likelihood, 
would not have conceived the "Paradise Lost" had he not lived 
and acted and felt with the Puritans and Vane and Cromwell, we 
may warrantably believe that he could not have made his poem 
the consummate work of art which it is, if his youthful fancy had 
not been fed, and his early studies completed, amidst the imagina- 
tive license and the courtly pomp that adorned the last days of 
the hierarchy and the monarchy. 

8. This tram of reflection, however, leads us to remember, that 
the poets of Kmg Charles's time were very far from being so pure 
or elevated in sentiment, as to make the gradual silencing of them 
a matter of unmixed regret. The poetry of a generation, regarded 
in the mass, is, of all its intellectual efforts, by far the quickest, as 
well as the most correct, in reflecting the aspects of the world 
without. In the readmess and closeness, indeed, with which it re- 
peats the lights and shades that fall on it from the face of society, 
it exceeds other kinds of literature quite as far, as the chemically 
prepared plate of the photograph exceeds a common mirror in its 
repetition of the forms and hues of the objects that are presented 
to it. Above all, this is true ; that the Muses have always been 
dangerously susceptible to impressions from the moral climate of 
the regions in which they are placed. 

Now, it has been hinted already, that the roughness of speech 
and manners which in Elizabeth's time prevailed to the last, was 
followed, in the next reign, by a real coarseness and lowness of sen- 
timent and principle. This grew worse and worse under James's 
son. The morality of those classes of society with which most of 
the poets associated, and in which their audiences were sought, un- 
derwent a rapid and lamentable declension from the time when the 
antagonism between the national parties was fairly established. 
Another issue might have been hoped for. The refined taste and 
studious habits of the unfortunate king were not, seemingly, a 
surer presage of royal countenance to literary genius, than his de- 
vout meditativeness, and his severe strictness of private conduct, 
were of encouragement to literature in teaching purity and good- 
ness. But, most unfortunately for all men, the morality of the 
cavaliers took, in spite of every obstacle, a course precisely parallel 
to that of the policy which had been adopted by the statesmen who 
ruled them. Just as every fresh demand made by the parliament 
on behalf of the people had brought forth some wider assertion of 



208 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARB, 

the prerogative of the crown ; not otherwise, throughout the war, 
with every step which the puritans and parliamentarians took to- 
wards purification of doctrine and amendment of life and manners, 
there arose, among the royalists, a new access of sneering at hypo- 
critical pretensions, an increase of zeal in the profession of religious 
indifference, and a waxing boldness in proclaiming the comfortable 
creed which declared profligacy to be the necessary qualification of 
a gentleman. The good men of the party (and there were many 
such) resisted and grieved in vain. If it was a bitter thing for the 
patriotic Falkland to die for a king against whose acts he had 
indignantly protested, it must have been bitter, doubly bitter, for 
truly pious men, like Hall, and Taylor, and Usher, to find them- 
selves preaching truth and goodness to hearers, by whom truth and 
goodness were equally set at nought. 

THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST. 

9. It remains, still, that we learn a few of the principal literary 
names, and one or two of the most prominent literary character- 
istics, that may be referred to the two eras which, in their social 
aspects, have now been considered together. The changes may be 
indicated most clearly if they are arranged in two successive stages ; 
and these are naturally marked off from each other by the suc- 
cessive changes of government. Yet neither the men nor the facts 
can be kept entirely separate. 

The time of Charles's rule was, naturally, more variously prolific 
than that which followed. 

In Poetry it was especially so. The quantity of beautiful verse 
which it has bequeathed to us is wonderful ; the forms in which 
fancy disported itself embrace almost all that are possible, except 
some of the most arduous ; the tone of sentiment shifted from the 
gravest to the gayest, from rapturous devotion to playful levity, 
from tragic tearfulness to fantastic wit, from moral solemnity to 
indecent licence ; the themes ranged from historical fact to in- 
vented fable, from the romantic story to the scene of domestic life, 
from momentous truths to puerile trifles. No great poet, however, 
appears in the crowd ; and it is enough to say, that among them 
were most of those whose sonnets, and odes, and other l3n'ics, will 
call for some notice hereafter. The Drama, though now no longer 
the chief walk of poetic art, was still rich in genius ; its most dis- 
tinguished names being those of Massmger, Ford, and Shirley. 
But here the aristocratic depravity had taken deeper root than any- 
where else : it was a blessing to the public that, soon after the 



BACON, AND MILTON. 209 

breaking out of the war, tlie theatres were shut, and their poets left 
to idleness or repentance. 

The Prose writers of the reign are worthily represented by two 
of the clergy. Hall was in the full maturity of his fame and 
usefulness ; and it is touching to see him, who had urgently remon- 
strated against the innovations of Laud, now combating generously 
for the church, and punished because he refused to separate him- 
self from her communion. Jeremy Taylor, also, now begins his 
career of eloquence and vicissitude ; as yet suffering little in the 
growing tumult, but destined to pass through a course of troubles 
hardly less severe than those of his elder contemporary. That the 
age was not without much erudition, is proved by his name, as 
well as by several others. But the greatest among all these is that 
of the universally learned Selden : and his position is in several 
respects illustrative of the character of his time, more than one of 
these indeed being common to him with Camden. Both were lay- 
men, as were one or two others of the most eminent scholars of this 
half century ; a point deserving to be remembered, as denoting the 
commencement of a social state widely different from the mediaeval. 
Both, again, not only were variously learned, but busied themselves, 
besides the ancient studies in which they were so eminent, with 
the antiquities of their native country ; while Selden's most suc- 
cessful literary labours were of a peculiarly practical cast. He, 
too, by far the most deeply read scholar of his age, found time and 
wiU to be a statesman and a lawyer. He sat in parliament ; and it 
was his own fault that he was not raised to the woolsack. In quit- 
ting this eventful reign, we may note, as its chief fact in. philosophy, 
that Hobbes was then preparing for his ambitious and diversified 
tasks, and publishing some of his earliest writings. 

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PEOTECTORATE. 

10. The Commonwealth and Protectorate, extending over no more 
than eleven years, made, for literature not less than for church 
and state, an epoch which would be very wrongly judged of, if its 
importance were to be reckoned as proportional to its brief dura- 
tion. The political republic worked strongly on the republic of 
letters ; but the impulse expended itself within a narrow circle, and 
produced total inaction in several quarters by coming into collision 
with the older tendencies. 

The Old English Drama was extinct. Poetry of other kinds had 
fewer votaries : most of the poets who had appeared in the courtly 
times were already dead ; and the room they left vacant was filled 



210 THE AGE OF SPENSEK, SHAKSPEARE, 

up verj thinly. The younger men were affected, powerfully and 
in most instances permanently, by the stern seriousness of the 
time : when the overstretched cord suddenly snapped at the Res- 
toration, the moral looseness which infected poetical sentiment 
showed itself chiefly in writers who, by one cause or another, had 
been placed beyond the puritanical influence. The literary aspect 
of poetry exhibited several very interesting symptoms, marking the 
time emphatically as one of transition from the old to the new. 
Cowley now closed, perhaps with greater brilliancy than it had 
ever possessed, the eccentric and artificial school of which Donne 
has been recorded as the founder : and Milton, though labouring 
vehemently, in the meanwhile, among those who strove to guide the 
social tempest, was thus really undergoing the last steps of that men- 
tal discipline which was soon to qualify him for standing forth, in dig- 
nified solitude, as the last and all but the greatest of our poetical 
ancients. At the very same time, the approach of a modern era 
was indicated, both by the frivolity of sentiment, and by the ease 
of versification and style, which prevailed in the poems of Waller. 
The works of Butler and Dryden belong, it is true, to the age that 
followed. But these were the days when the former was marking 
the victims who were afterwards to writhe under his satiric lash : 
and the latter was already beginning his devious and doubtful 
course, by offering his homage at the feet of the Protector. 

Philosophy could command little attention; but philosophers 
were neither idle nor silent. Hobbes, fortified by exile in his un- 
compromising championship of royal supremacy, sounded his first 
blasts of defiance to constitutional freedom and ecclesiastical inde- 
pendence. In the cloisters of Cambridge, on the other hand, two 
deep though mystical thinkers, undistracted by the din which was 
heard around, grappled quietly with the most arduous problems of 
philosophic thought. Henry More expounded those Platonic dreams 
of his, which were not altogether dreams ; while Cudworth began to 
vindicate belief in the being of the Almighty, and in the essential 
foundations of moral distinctions. 

Theology, the highest of all sciences, and that which then direct- 
ed both opinion and practice among the leading men of England, 
was cultivated with general alacrity, in many and diverse depart- 
ments, and with great variety both of feeling and thought. Among 
its teachers were several of our great prose writers. The venera- 
ble Hall, towards the end of the period, closed his honourable life, 
persecuted and poor, but cheerful and courageous : Jeremy Taylor, 
like the non-conformists in his own later days, toiled the more 
vigorously at his desk when the pulpit was shut against him. The 



BACON, AND MILTON. 211 

. Puritans, who were now the ruling power in the state, became also 
a power in literature : and their force of reasoning, and their impres- 
siveness of eloquence, are nobly represented by the distinguished 
name of Eichard Baxter. 

11. Among the prose works of Milton, some belong to the theo- 
logical and ecclesiastical controversies of the time; others deal 
with those social and political questions then discussed in many 
very able writings, of which his may here suffice as examples. He, 
like several of his remarkable contemporaries, lived iato the suc- 
ceeding generation : and he may be accepted as the last represen- 
tative of the eloquence of English Prose, in that brilliant stage of 
its history, which, when looked at from a general point of view, is 
found to terminate about the date of the Restoration. 

It should be observed, indeed, that, in prose not less than in 
verse, the earliest aspirants of the new school were producing ex- 
cellent assay-pieces, while the ancient masters worked with undi- 
minished vigour after their accustomed models. The works of the 
eccentrically eloquent Sir Thomas Browne, who lived, though with- 
out writing, for twenty years in the reign of Charles the Second, 
are exaggerated specimens, both for good and evil, of all the qual- 
ities characterizing the style of his predecessors. Cowley the poet, 
on the contrary, who hardly survived the Protectorate, has given 
us a few prose writings which, in point of style, stand alone in 
their age : they have a modern ease, and simplicity, and regular- 
ity, which, if we did not know their date, might induce us to 
think they must have been composed thirty or forty years later. 
In a word, the anticipation of the future, with which Hooker's 
style surprised us at the beginning of our period, is paralleled by 
that which Cowley's exhibits at its close. 

At this point, then, ends the first great section in the History 
of English Eloquence. Hardly taking more than a beginning in 
the last generation of Elizabeth's reign, it stretches forward till a 
little past the middle of the seventeenth century. In regard to the 
contents of the books in which the most remarkable prose com- 
positions of our language are thus embodied, we shall learn some- 
thing immediately. In the meantime, we may enable ourselves to 
understand the Character of the Style which prevails among their 
writers, by studying an analytic description of it, given by one of 
our highest critical authorities. 

" To this period belong most of those whom we commonly reckon 
our Old English Writers ; men often of such sterling worth for 
their sense, that we might read them with little regard to then* 
language; yet, in some instances at least, possessing much that 



212 THE AaE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

demands praise in this respect. They are generally nervous and ' 
effective, copious to redundancy in their command of words, apt to 
employ what seemed to them ornament with much imagination 
rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into conmion- 
place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many de- 
fects. Some of them, especially the most learned, are full of 
pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous 
mixture of Latinisms unknown before : at other times we are dis- 
gusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs : nor is it 
uncommon to find these opposite blemishes, not only in the same 
author, but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very 
few, are ill constructed and tediously prolonged : their ears, again 
with some exceptions, seem to have been insensible to the beauty 
of rhythmical prose : grace is commonly wanting : and their notion 
of the artifices of style, when they thought at all about them, was 
not congenial to our language. This may be accepted as a general 
description of the English writers under James and Charles : some 
of the most famous may, in a certain degree, be deemed to modify 
the censure."* 



* Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, 
Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. 



THE AGE OF SPENSEK, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 213 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION second: THE SCHOLASTIC AND ECCLESIASTICAL 
LITEKATURE. 

Erudition, Classical and Ecclesiastical. 1, Gleneral State of Eccle- 
siastical Learning — Eminent Names — Eaynolds — Andrewes — Usher — 
Classical Studies — Camden and Selden — Latin Prose and Verse. — Trans- 
lations OF THE Holy Bible. 2. The Geneva Bible — Whittingham — 
The Bishops' Bible — Parker. — 3. King James's Bible — Its History — The 
Translators— Its Universal Eeception.— Original Theological Writ- 
ings. 4. The Elizabethan Period — Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity — 
Eeign of James — Sermons of Bishop Andrewes — Sermons of Donne. — 5. 
Eeign of Charles — Hall and Taylor compared. — 6. Bishop Hall — His 
Sermons — His other "Works. — 7. Jeremy Taylor— His Treatises — His 
Sermons — Character of his Eloquence. — 8. The Commonwealth and Pro- 
tectorate — Controversial Writings — The Puritans — Eichard Baxter — His 
Life and Works. 

ERUDITION, CLASSICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL. 

1. The Prose Literature of the illustrious period with which we 
are busied, is equally vast in amount and various in range. Our 
ambition must limit itself to the acquiring of a little knowledge, in 
regard to a few of the most distinguished names, and a very few of 
the most valuable or characteristic sorts of writing. 

The successive changes having already been traced hastUy in 
the order of time, our task will now be easiest if the phenomena 
are regarded according to their kinds. Theology and its contribu- 
tory sciences wUl first present themselves : philosophy will be fol- 
lowed by history ; and, afterwards, from a varied and interestmg 
mass of miscellaneous compositions, there may be selected and 
arranged the most remarkable specimens. 

The study of the Oriental Languages, and other pursuits bearing 



214 THE REIGNS OF ELIZABETH, JAMES, AND CHARLES. 

immediately on Theology, flourished largely throughout om- period, 
or, at any rate, from the middle of Elizabeth's time. Several of 
those churchmen whose English writings will soon call for notice, 
were honourable examples of the high professional knowledge pos- 
sessed by their order. Hooker, however, is said to have been the 
first divine of the Reformed Church who was both remarkably 
learned and remarkably eloquent. The credit of having been the 
most erudite among the theologians of the great queen's reign, is 
assigned to Thomas Raynolds, whose opinions tended to puritanism, 
and whose works are very httle known. The path of learning in 
which he and other ecclesiastics were most highly distinguished, 
was that which has been called Patristic Theolog}'-, that is, the 
study of the early Fathers of the Christian Church. The reputa- 
tion which Raynolds had enjoyed in this field, devolved, in the time 
of James, on Bishop Andrewes, whose celebrity as an orator will 
present him again to om* view. He may here be described as 
having been one of the best and wisest of those who held the 
ecclesiastical views, developed afterwards so uncompromisingly by 
Archbishop Laud : indeed, if not the founder of this High Church 
party, he is said to have been certainly the earhest of its literary 
advocates. In the next reign, the Low Church party, and the Irish 
nation, possessed the man most famous of aU for Patristic learning ; 
one indeed who, whUe his knowledge extended widely beyond the 
studies of his profession, has been declared to have been in these the 
most profound scholar whom the Protestant Church of our country 
has ever produced. This learned man was Archbishop Usher, 
who was at the same time one of the most pious and devoted of 
ministers. 

While Theological erudition prospered thus signally, the study of 
the Pure Classics was by no means prosecuted with so much success. 
It could not boast of any very celebrated name, either in the more 
exact school which had formerly prevailed, or in that historical 
method of philology which was followed so actively on the con- 
tinent throughout the first half of the seventeenth centur}^ When 
it is said that the times of James and Charles were learned, 
what is meant is this ; that the literary men were deeply read in 
classical books, but not that they were deeply versed in classical 
philology. Greek, likewise, was not so well known as Latin. 
Probably the most correct and profound of our scholars were such 
laymen as Camden and Selden : and they, as it has already been 
remarked, were far from bounding their studies by the limits of 
the ancient world. Among those men whose pursuits were chiefly 
classical, Grataker was eminently distinguished. The name of the 



TRANSLATIONS OF THE HOLY BIBLE. 215 

industrious Farnaby will sometimes come in the way of the Latin 
reader : and Sir Henry SaviUe, eminent for his own learning, was 
still more so for the munificence with which he aided the studies 
of others. 

Many of the philosophical and polemical writings of the times 
were couched in Latin : so likewise were some of its histories. In 
the last stage of the period, poetry was composed elegantly in that 
tongue by May and Cowley, and still more finely by Milton. 

THE TRANSLATIONS OF THE HOLY BIBLE. 

2. Oriental learning and Classical, a love of goodness, and a zeal 
for national enlightenment, co-operated in producing the most valua- 
ble of those efi'orts which present themselves in the field of Theol- 
ogy. We have to mark a second series of Translations of the 
Holy Scriptures : and, to reach its beginnings, we look back, for 
the last time, to the middle of the sixteenth century. 

The first of the three versions whose appearance is now to be 
recorded, came from the same little knot of exiles, English and 
Scottish, who had sought refuge in Geneva, and had there already 
published a revised edition of the New Testament. Then* entire 
Translation of the Bible was printed at the cost of the congregation, 
one of the most active of whose members was the father of the 
founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Being completed soon 
after the accession of Elizabeth, it was published in 1560 : it was 
accompanied by a dedication to her, and a prefatory epistle " To 
our beloved in the Lord, the brethren of England, Scotland, and 
Ireland." Coverdale, John Knox, and several others, have been 
said to have had some share in the work ; but three only can posi- 
tively be named, aU of whom were afterwards ministers in the 
Church of England. Whittingham, Calvin's brother-in-law, who 
had edited the New Testament, was for nearly twenty years Dean 
of Durham, though troubled by his metropohtan for his Genevese 
tendencies ; Gilby died at a good old age as Eector of Ashby-de-la- 
Zouch; and Sampson, refusing a bishopric, became successively 
Dean of Christ Church, and a Prebendary of Saint Paul's, losing 
the first office by being a non-conformist in the matter of costume. 
The Geneva Bible became, and long continued to be, the favourite 
version among the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians. 

It was not, indeed, adopted by the Church of England. But 
Cranmer's version, which had been restored to public use, was 
admittedly open to improvements ; and measures were quickly taken 
for the purpose. The chief promoter of the good work was Matthew 



216 THE KEIGNS OF ELIZABETH AND JAMES. 

b. 1504. \ Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the most eminent 
d. 1575. ]■ among the fathers of the English Church. He had the honour, 
in early life, of declining to become a professor in Oxford, under the 
patronage of Wolsey ; and, attaching himself to the Protestant 
party, and losing valuable preferments on the accession of Queen 
Mary, he improved his knowledge still further in his enforced 
leisure, and was held to be, both in theology and history, one of 
the best informed men of his day. Now placed at the head of the 
church, he conducted its organization with great ability and skiU, 
though not always to the satisfaction of those among the clergy 
who had inclinations towards Puritanism. 

It seems to be generally allowed, that his great undertaking, of 
revising the version of the Scriptures, was executed by men fur- 
nished with ampler resources of learning, theological, classical, and 
oriental, than any that had yet been applied in England to the 
sacred task. His version, which was published in 1568, is usually 
called the Bishops' Bible, a majority of the fifteen translators having 
been selected from the. bench. Those of them whose names are 
most widely known were probably the following : Grrindal, Parker's 
energetic successor in the Primacy ; Bentham, who was esteemed 
as a commentator ; the despotic and learned Sandys ; and Cox, the 
venerable bishop of Ely, who had been the tutor of Edward the 
Sixth. 

Thenceforth, till our last step, the two new versions were, with 
hardly any exception, the only ones that issued from the press. 
We are told that, in the course of Elizabeth's reign, there appeared 
eighty-five editions of the English Bible, and forty-five of the New 
Testament ; sixty of the former being impressions of the Geneva 
version. 

It is right also to note, in passing, the dates of the Eoman 
Catholic version, commonly known as the Douay Bible. The New 
Testament appeared in 1582, and the Old Testament in 1610. 

3. Our current translation, as every one knows, belongs to the 
reign of James, The first movement towards it was made in the cele- 
brated Conference at Hampton Court, when the learned Eaynolds, 
the leader of the puritanical party, and then president of Corpus 
Christi College in Oxford, proposed to the king that there should be a 
new version. In 1604, a royal letter, addressed to the Primate Ban- 
croft, announced that the sovereign had appointed fifty-four learned 
men for translating the Bible, and ordered that measures should be 
taken, by securing the co-operation of eminent Greek and Hebrew 
scholars, and otherwise, for the commencement and progress of the 
undertaking. The labours of these persons, however, did not begin 



J TRANSLATIONS OF THE HOLY BIBLE. 217 

till the spring of 1607 ; they lasted about three years ; and the ver- 
sion which was the fruit of them was published in 1611. Among 
the other instructions issued to the translators, are articles directing, 
that the Bishops' Bible " shall be followed, and as little altered as 
the original will permit;" but that the translations of Tyndale, 
Matthew, Coverdale, Cranmer, and the Geneva Bible, shall " be 
used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible." 

Of the forty-seven translators whose names are recorded, there 
were many in regard to whom enough is known to show, that, in the 
kinds of knowledge qualifying for such a task, they were among 
the most learned men in a learned age. Oxford, Cambridge, and 
Westminster, supplied then* most eminent scholars, who were dis- 
tributed into sections, varying in number from ten to seven ; the 
work being apportioned among these, and provision made for an 
exchange of corrections among the several companies, and for a 
final revision by a committee. Perhaps Bishop Andrewes was the 
most famous man among the translators, Ea}molds the most profound 
theologian, and Su* Henry Saville the most distinguished for classi- 
cal and general accomplishment. The array of Oriental and Eab- 
binical erudition seems to have been particularly strong. 

The Geneva version still for a time retained its popularity : and 
a new version was one of the abortive schemes of the Long Parlia- 
ment. A committee of the Protector's Parliament of 1657 con- 
sulted several profound scholars, among whom were the philosophical 
Cudworth, the celebrated Orientalist Brian Walton, and Edmund 
Castell, his chief coadjutor in the Polyglott Bible. On the evidence of 
these competent judges, they reported to the House that, taken as a 
whole. King James's is " the best of any translation in the world." 
Its reception may be considered as having thereafter been universal. 

It is needless to say how nobly simple are the style and diction 
of this, the book in which all of us read the Word of Truth. Just 
as little does any one require to be informed, that it has had a wide 
influence for good on the character of our language. But it may be 
well that we call to mind the manner in which it was concocted ; 
and that we remember how, as a necessary consequence of this, its 
phraseology is considerably more antique than that of the time in 
which it appeared. It was well for the purity of the English tongue, 
that the history of the English Bible took the course it did. 

ORIGINAL THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS. 

4. Our brief memoranda of original writings, produced by the 
Old English Divines, open auspiciously with the venerable name of 

K 



218 THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. 

b. 1553. > Hooker. His great work, the " Ecclesiastical Polity," is 
d. 1600. j highly valued as an exposition and defence of those views 
of the relations between church and state, according to which the 
Keformed Church of England was organized ; but it is also a noble 
effort of philosophical thinking, which is conducted with especial 
force and mastery in the ethical disquisitions making up its First 
Book. In point of eloquence, the work is at this day, perhaps, the 
very noblest monument which our language possesses : it is certainly 
unapproached by anything that appeared in the next century. 
More than Ciceronian in its fulness and dignity of style, it wears, 
with all its richness, a sober majesty which is equally admirable 
and rare.* 

* RICHAKD HOOKER. ] 

From the First Booh of tlie Treatise " Of the Laics of Ecclesiastical Polity f 
published in 1594. 

Albeit much of that we are to speak in this present cause may seem to a 
number perhaps tedious, perhaps obscure, dark, and inti-icate ; (for many 
talk of the truth, which never somided the depth from whence it springeth ; 
and therefore, when they are led thereunto, they are soon weary, as men 
drawn from those beaten paths wherewith they have been inured ;) yet this 
may not so far prevail, as to cut off that which the matter itself requireth, 
howsoever the nice humour of some be therewith pleased or no. They 
unto whom Ave shall seem tedious are in no wise injured by us, because 
it is in theu' own hands to spare that labour which they are not willing 
to endure. And if any complain of obscurity, they must consider, that in 
these matters it cometh no otherwise to pass, than in sundry the works both 
of art and also of nature, where that which hath greatest force in the very 
things we see, is notwithstanding itself oftentimes not seen. The stateli- 
ness of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we behold them, delighteth the 
eye : but that foundation which beareth up the one, that root which minis- 
tereth unto the other nourishment and life, is in the bosom of the earth con- 
cealed ; and if there be at any time occasion to search into it, such labour is 
then more necessary than pleasant, both to them which undertake it and for 
the lookers-on. In like manner, the use and benefit of good laws all that 
live under them may enjoy with delight and comfort ; albeit the grounds and 
first original causes from whence they have sprung be unknown, as to the 
greatest part of men they are. But when they who withdraw their obedience 
pretend that the laws which they should obey are corrupt and vitious ; for 
better examination of their quality, it behoveth the very foundation and root, 
the highest well-spring and fountain of them, to be discovered. 

* * * * 4(, 

Now, if nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, though it 
were but for a while, the observation of her own laws ; if those principal and 
mother elements of the world, whereof all things in this lower world are 
made, should lose the qualities which now they have ; if the frame of that 
heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if 



THE SERMONS OF BISHOP ANDEEWES. 219 

" His periods, indeed, are generally much too long and too intri- 
cate ; but portions of them are beautifully rhythmical : his language 
is rich in English idiom without vulgarity, and in words of a Latin 
som'ce without pedantry. He is perhaps the first in England who 
adorned his prose with the images of poetry. But this he has done 
more judiciously, and with greater moderation, than others of great 
name ; and we must be bigots in Attic severity, before we can ob- 
ject to some of his grand figures of speech." * 

Of the turn of theological writings in the time of James, an ade- 
quate idea might probably be gained from the pulpit-oratory of 
two of its divines. The first, who has already been named for 
his eminent learning and his position as an ecclesiastical leader, 
was the most popular preacher of the day : the other, whom we 
took as the representative of the poetry of his time, transferred 
himself in middle age from civil life to the church, and appears to 
have become particularly acceptable to refined and well instructed 
hearers. 

b. 1565. > The sermons of Bishop Andrewes exemplify, very per- 
d. 1626. j tinently, the chief defects m style that have been attributed 
to the writers of his period ; while to these they add other faults, 
incident to the effusions of a mind poor in fancy, coarse in taste, 
ingeniously rash in catching at trivial analogies, and constantly 
burying good thoughts under a heap of useless phrases. Yet, though 
they were corrupt models, and dangerous in proportion to the fame 
of the author, it is not surprismg that they made the extraordinary 
impression they did. They contain, more than any other works of 
their kind and time, the unworked materials of oratory ; and of ora- 
tory, too, belonging to the most severe and powerful class. There 
is something Demosthenic in the impatient vehemence, with which 
the pious bishop showers down his short, clumsy, harsh sentences ; 
and the likeness becomes still more exact, when we hear him alter- 
nating stern and eager questions with sad or indignant answers. 

celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volu- 
bility turn themselves any way as it might happen ; if the prince of the lights 
of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it 
were, through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself; 
if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the 
year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixtures, the winds breathe 
out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly 
influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts 
of their mother no longer able to yield them relief: what would become of 
man himself, whom these things now do all serve ? See we not plainly that 
obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world? 
* Hallam : Introduction to the Literatui-e of Europe. 



220 * THE REIGN OF JAMES. 

His Latin quotations, though incessant, are always brief : his field 
of erudite illustration is prudently confined; and his multiplied 
divisions and sub-divisions, being quite agreeable to the growing 
fashion, may have helped to increase the respect of the hearers for 
the great strength and ingenuity of thought which the preacher so 
often showed. There is often much aptness in the parallels, which 
it is his besetting fault to accumulate so thickly, and overdraw so 
gi'otesquely ; and an overpowering effect must sometimes have been 
produced by the dexterous boldness with which, anticipating an 
adverse opinion or feeling, he throws it back in the teeth of those 
who were likely to entertain it. Thus, in a charity sermon, catch- 
ing at a phrase of Latimer's, which (it appears) was not yet for- 
gotten, and briefly admitting the justice of the censure which it im- 
plied, he suddenly turns away, to work out, in an opposite direc- 
tion, the very vein of thought which we found in the martyr's 
Sermon on the Plough.* 

* BISHOP ANDREWES. 
From the Sermon (1 Tim. vi. 17, 18, 1^,) preached at Saint Mary's EosjpitaJ. 

Well then ! if to " do good" be a part of the charge, what is it to do good ? 
It is a positive thing (good) ; not a privative, to do no harm. Yet, as the 
world goeth now, we are fain so to commend men : " He is an honest man : 
he doth no hurt :" of which praise any wicked man, that keeps himself to 
himself, may be partaker. But it is to do some good thing : — What good 
thing ? I will not answer as in the schools : I fear I should not be under- 
stood. I will go grossly to work. 

This know, that God hath not given sight to the eye to enjoy, but to lighten 
the members ; nor wisdom to the honourable man, but for us men of simple 
shallow forecast ; nor learning to the divine, but for the ignorant ; so neither 
riches to the wealthy, but for those that want relief. Think you Timothy 
hath his depositum, and we ours, and you have none ? It is sure you have. 
We ours, in inward graces and treasures of knowledge ; you yours, in out- 
ward blessings and treasures of wealth. But both are deposita ; and we both 
are feoffees of trust. 

I see there is a strange hatred, and a bitter gainsaying, everywhere stirred 
up against unpreaching prelates (as you term them) and pastors that feed 
themselves only : and they are well worthy. If I might see the same hatred 
begun among yourselves, I would think it sincere. But that I cannot see. 
For that which a slothful divine is in things spiritual, that is a rich man 
for himself and nobody else in things carnal : and they are not pointed at. 
But sure you have your harvest, as well as we ours ; and that a great harvest. 
Lift up your eyes and see the streets round about jou ; the harvest is verily 
great, and the laboiirers few. Let us pray (both) that the Lord would thrust 
out labourers into both these harvests : that, the treasures of knowledge being 
opened, they may have the bread of eternal life ; and, the treasures of well- 
doing being opened, they may have the bread of this life : and so they may 
want neither. 



THE SERMONS OF DONNE. 221 

h. 1573. ) Donne's Sermons are of a very different cast. They 
d. 1631. I ai-e immeasurably superior in every point bearing on 
style ; and, if the taste of the writer cannot be called pure, it errs, 
as in his poetry, by being fantastic, not by being coarse. The poet's 
fancy sometimes prompts images, and figm-es of speech, that are full 
of a serious and thoughtful beauty ; and the language, while it flows 
on with a sustained though not very musical fulness, reaches, in some 
passages, though not so often as might have been expected, a fine 
felicity of phrase, not unlike that which adorns so many of his verses. 
But, when regarded as oral addresses, these interesting composi- 
tions are not only not comparable to those of Andre wes, but much 
below many others of the time. Then- tone is essentially medita- 
tive, not oratorical. The structure of the style, and the turn of the 
thoughts, are ahke appropriate to the writer in the closet, not to the 
speaker in the church. While, also, the reflections are sometimes 
profound, and very often striking, many of them are as subtle and 
far-fetched as those which deform his lyrical pieces. Many of his 
most dazzling illustrations are made plausible only by feats of rhe- 
torical sleight-of-hand : the likeness between the objects vanishes, 
the moment we translate the thoughts into plain terms. In one 
place he remarks, that east and west are opposites in a flat map, 
but are made to unite by rolling the map on a globe ; and he detects, 
in this, a parallel to the application of religion to a dejected con- 
science, which causes tranquillity to take the place of trouble. He 
produces a very impressive effect, by odd means, in treating the 
text, " Who hath believed our report ?" He declines at first to say 
where the words are to be found ; he dwells on the frequency with 
which the sacred writers repeat truths that are momentous ; and 
then, announcing that the complaint of the text is made three times 
in scriptm'e, he uses the fact as a proof of the prevalence of unbelief 
in all ages. The discourses of Donne derive a touching interest 
from the course of his history. They are memorials of those twenty 
years of devotion and charity, of religious study and action, which, 
when youth had been wasted in the search for worldly fame, and 
when manhood had been left solitary, closed the life of a man emi- 
nent both for genius and for learning. 

5. The theological literature of the reign of Charles, is represented 
in its most brilliant light by two of his celebrated prelates. Joseph 
Hall and Jeremy Taylor are the most eloquent of all our Old English 
Divines ; and their works were, in themselves, enough to make an 
epoch in the rehgious literature of the nation . It may reasonably be 
questioned, however, whether the younger of the two does not receive 
more than justice, in the comparisons usually drawn between them. 



222 THE EEIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST 

Alike eminent for Christian piety and conscientious zeal, alike 
warmed by feelings of deep devotion, they yet exhibit mental char- 
acteristics distinguishing them as clearly, as did those differences 
in opinion and inclination, which exposed the former to the imputa- 
tion of puritanism, and intrenched the latter impregnably in his 
reverence for ecclesiastical antiquity and ritual pomp. Much infe- 
rior to Taylor in wealth of imagination. Hall stands immeasurably 
higher in strength of reasoning. Both abound in originality of 
thought : but the one is clear, systematic, and often profound, in 
tracing out the relations of the ideas that have suggested themselves 
to him ; the other is hardly ever methodical or exact, is often incon- 
sistent, and still oftener confused. Taylor has no command over 
his fancy : it continually hurries him away from his path, wafting 
him so far that we, who are irresistibly carried along with him, lose 
ourselves in the attempt to find our way back. Hall, on the con- 
trary, hardly ever loses sight of the road for a moment : the finest 
images which he conjures up (and many of them are wonderfully 
fine) never displace in his mind the great truths, for the sake of 
which they are admitted. He is remarkable, also, for the practical 
plainness and directness of the appeals he makes ; nor is he less so 
for the shrewdness of observation with which he enforces them. 
Beginning his literary career as a writer of poetical satires, he never 
forgot the habit of looking around him, on the scenes of life, as well 
as those of inanimate nature. Hall is as pedantic as Taylor, but 
not in the same way. His Latin quotation, or his old story, is 
usually allowed to work its effect without much pains on his part : 
it is while he develops the course of his own reflections, that he 
imagines and presents his illustrative sketches of scenery or society. 
Taylor, while he hardly ever, in his oratorical works at least, stoops 
to describe familiar hfe, seems always to have his imagination most 
actively kindled, not when he is prosecuting his own track of 
thought, but when a first hint has been given by a book studied, or 
by a striking event recollected and repeated to us. In the conception 
and representation of emotion, both of these eloquent men are very 
powerful. But Taylor's moods of passion bear him onward through 
long and equably sustained flights: Hall's depth of feeling, often 
more intense than that of the other, comes in quick bursts, which 
speedily die away into argiiment and reflection, or are interrupted 
and chilled by thoughts suggesting quaint antithetic comparisons. 
In this last point, not improbably, lies the reason why the former 
was so much more effective in public oratory than the latter. 
h. 1574. •) 6- Among those works of Hall's which are not contro- 
d. 1656. j versial, the best known, as well as the largest, is his series 



BISHOP HALL. 223 

of " Contemplations " on historical passages of the Bible. These 
are equally admirable for their soundness of judgment, their correct- 
ness of commentary, and the devoutness which continually pervades 
their temper. Perhaps the cast of his genius is better shown in 
some of his other efforts. 

His Pulpit-Discourses cannot be said to equal Taylor's ; yet some 
of them, such as the " Passion Sermon," are nobly and even ornately 
eloquent. If his erudition is obtruded frequently, it is seldom 
paraded at great length ; and he works up, with great force, some 
illustrations which remind us that his generation had not long 
emerged from the middle ages. Citing Bromyard as his authority, 
he tells his hearers an improved version of the story of the golden 
apple, which we met with in the Gesta. Again, desiring to exem- 
plify the spu'itual warfare of Saint Paul, he describes, from an his- 
torian of the Norman Time, the ceremonies which attended the 
consecration of Hereward the Saxon to the dignity of knighthood. 
Frank allusions to social habits and contemporary occurrences are 
as common in his sermons as in his other compositions ; nor do 
we escape without two or three puns. The prevalent tone is 
serious, heartfelt, and anxiously earnest ; and there are many out- 
breaks of vehement emotion. In one majestic passage, of a dis- 
course denouncing the cruelties of war, he describes the Queen and 
people of England kneeling in prayer, while the colossal fleet of 
Spain floated towards the shore like a moving wood : in another 
place he contrasts, with remarkable picturesqueness of portraiture, 
the prevalent worldliness of the time with the Christian's mortifica- 
tion of body and spirit : and a discourse on the transformation and 
renewing of the mind is embellished with a profusion of analogies and 
instances, resembling not remotely the favourite strain of Taylor. 

But Hall's strength is put forth most successfully in some writ- 
ings akin to the " Contemplations ;" and these are so few, so small 
in bulk, and so little marked by the oddities of the age, that every 
reader may become acquainted with this great man, more easily 
and pleasantly than with any of his contemporaries. His " Charac- 
ters of Virtues and Vices," though they were among the earliest 
models of a kind of sketches, which became very fashionable, might 
safely be overlooked ; unless we wished to see the author freely in- 
dulging his inclination to epigrammatic contrasts. He wUl be stu- 
died, with greatest advantage, in two collections, containing detached 
fragments of reflection : the " Occasional Meditations ;" and the 
'' Three Centuries of Meditations and Vows." The latter series is 
the more various of the two, both in tone and in form. Brief 
apophthegms, and acute hints on life and manners, alternate with 



224 THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST. 

prolonged trains of contemplation, breaking out incessantly into 
fervent prayer. The pieces of the other series are particularly rich 
in beautiful description. They set down thoughts prompted by 
ordinary objects and occurrences, of town and country, of life and 
death, of man and nature ; the redbreast at the window, the weedy 
field of corn, the starry heavens, the rising in the morning and the 
lying down at night, a lovely landscape of hill and vale, a spring 
bubbling up in the wild forest, a negro and an idiot seen in the 
street, the red-cross chalked on a door during the plague, the pass- 
ing-bell proclaiming the departure of a soul, the ruins of an ancient 
abbey, and a heap of stones which might have covered the grave 
of the first martyr. In all the meditations, of both groups, the 
evidence of great literary power is quite unequivocal. When the 
witty and accomplished Sir Henry Wotton gave to his friend Bishop 
Hall the name of " The English Seneca," he compared our Christian 
philosopher with a man to whom, in every respect, he was immeas- 
urably superior.* 

* BISHOP HALL. 

I. From the " Meditations and Vows^ Divine and Moral." 

***** 
I never loved those salamanders, that are never weU but when they are 
in the fire of contention. I will rather suffer a thousand wrongs, than oflFer 
one : I will suffer an hundred, rather than return one : I will suffer many, 
ere I will complain of one and endeavour to right it by contending. I have 
ever found, that to strive with mj superior, is furious ; with my equal, 
doubtful ; with my inferior, sordid and base ; with any, full of unquietness. 

***** 

The world is a stage : every man is an actor, and plays his part, here, 
either in a comedy or tragedy. The good man is a comedian, which, how- 
ever he begins, ends merrily : but the wicked man acts a tragedy, and 
therefore ever ends in horror. Thou seest a wicked man vaunt himself on 
this stage : stay till the last act, and look to his end, (as David did,) and see 
whether that be peace. Thou wouldst make strange tragedies, if thou 
wouldst have but one act. The best wicked man cannot be so envied in his 
first shows, as he is pitiable in his conclusion. 

* * * * * 

As Love keeps the whole law, so Love only is the breaker of it ; being 
the ground, as of all obedience, so of all sin. For, whereas sin hath been 
commonly accounted to have two roots. Love and Fear ; it is plain that 
Fear hath his original from Love : for no man fears to lose aught but what 
he loves. Here is sin and righteousness brought both into a short sum, de- 
pending both upon one poor affection : it shall be my only care, therefore, 
to bestow my love well, both for object and measure. All that is good I 
may love, but in several degrees ; what is simply good, absolutely ; what Ls 
good by circumstance, only with limitation. There be these three things 
that I may love without exception ; God, my neighbour, my soul ; yet so as 



BISHOP HALL. 225 

h. 1613. \ 7. Jeremy Taylor's controversial tracts, and his essays 
d. 1667. ]■ in dogmatic theology, lie, like similar writings of HaU, 
beyond om* sphere. But two which faU within this description 
require a passing notice. In his " Liberty of Prophesying," Taylor 

each have their due place : my body, goods, fame, et cetera, as servants to 
the former. All other things I will either riot care for, or hate. 

***** 

The estate of heavenly and earthly things is plainly represented to us by 
the two lights of heaven, which are appointed to rule the night and the day. 
Earthly things are rightly resembled by the Moon, which, being nearest to 
the region of mortality, is ever in changes, and never looks upon us twice 
with the same face ; and, when it is at the full, is blemished with some dark 
blots, not capable of any illumination. Heavenly things are figured by the 
Sun, whose great and glorious light is both natural to itself and ever con- 
stant. That other fickle and dim star is fit enough for the night of misery, 
wherein we live here below. And this firm and beautiful light is but good 
enough for that day of glory, which the saints live in. 

***** 

n. From the " Occasional Meditations.''^ 
Ujpon the Sight of a Great Library. 

What a world of wit is here packed up together ! I know not whether 
this sight doth more dismay or comfort me. It dismays me to think, that 
here is so much that I cannot know : it comforts me to think, that this 
variety yields so good helps to know what I should. There is no truer 
word than that of Solomon : " There is no end of making many books." 
This sight verifies it : there is no end : indeed it were pity there should. 
God hath given to man a busy soul, the agitation whereof cannot but, 
through time and experience, work out many hidden truths : to suppress these 
would be no other than injurious to mankind, whose minds, like unto so 
many candles, should be kindled by each other. The thoughts of our 
deliberation are most accurate : these we vent into our papers. 

"What an happiness is it, that, without all offence of necromancy, I may here 
call up any of the ancient worthies of learning, whether human or divine, 
and confer with them of all my doubts ! That I can at pleasure summon 
whole synods of reverend fathers and acute doctors from all the coasts of the 
earth, to give their well studied judgments in all points of question which I 
propose ! Neither can I cast my eye casually upon any of these silent mas- 
ters, but I must learn somewhat. It is a wantonness to complaia of choice. 
No law binds us to read all : but the more we can take in and digest, the 
better-hkiag must the mind needs be. 

Blessed be God, that hath set up so many clear lamps in his Church ! 
Now none but the wilfully blind can plead darkness. And blessed be the 
memory of those his faithful servants, that have left their blood, their 
spirits, their lives, in these precious papers; and have willingly wasted 
themselves iato these duriag monuments, to give light imto others ! 

Upon Hearing of Music hy Night. 
How sweetly doth this music soimd in this dead season ! In the daytime 
it would not, it could not, so much affect the ear. All harmonious sounds 

k2 



226 THE REIGN OF CHARLES THE FIRST. 

was the first to enter a direct protest in belialf of tolerance in re- 
ligion ; a principle which, however familiar now, was not so before 
the Civil War. His " Ductor Dubitantium" is a treatise on Cas- 
uistry, a guide for clerical dealing with cases of conscience : and 
the attempt to revive systematic rules of the sort was a character- 
istic instance of the writer's constant hankering after antique opin- 
ions and usages. Among his practical works, the most popular 
are his " Holy Living" and " Holy Dying ;" but, fine as are these, 
and his " Life of Christ," he is still more at home in his devotional 
treatises, such as the " Golden Grove." 

Although these, again, abound with his deep fervour of senti- 
ment, their form gives little scope for his great variety of literary 
accomplishment. It is his Sermons that have gained for him 
the fame he commonly enjoys, as the most eloquent of our Old 
Divines. Taken aU in all, they perhaps evince such a combina- 
tion of powers, as has not appeared in any other pulpit-orations. 
They have been described admirably by one of our best critics ; to 
whose estimate of them this only should be premised. The faults 
of the great preacher are mainly attributable to two causes : to his 
abstracted and imaginative turn of mind, which makes him too 
often forget his audience in the delighted eagerness with which he 
contemplates his own thoughts ; and to the pedantic and uncritical 
tastes of his age, which are the root of almost aU his other defects.* 

are advanced by a silent darkness. Thus it is with the glad tidings of sal- 
vation : the Grospel never sounds so sweet, as in the night of persecution or 
of our own private a£9.iction. It is ever the same: the difference is in our 
disposition to receive it. Oh God, whose praise it is to give songs in the 
night, make my prosperity conscionahle and my crosses cheerful ! 

* JEREMY TAYLOR. 
From the Sermon on the Day of Judgment. 

"When the first day of judgment happened, that (I mean) of the universal 
deluge of waters on the old world, the calamity swelled like the flood ; and 
every man saAv his friend perish, and the neighbours of his dwelling, and the 
relatives of his house, and the sharers of his joys, and yesterday's bride, and 
the new born heir, the priest of the family, and the honour of the kindred ; 
all dying or dead, drenched in water and the Divine vengeance : and then 
they had no place to flee unto ; no man cared for their souls : they had none 
to go unto for counsel, no sanctuary high enough to keep them from the ven- 
geance that rained down from heaven. And so it shall be at the Day of 
Judgment, when that world and this, and all that shall be born hereafter, 
shall pass through the same Eed Sea, and be all baptized with the same fire, 
and be involved in the same cloud, in which shall be thimderings and terrors 
infinite. Every man's fear shall be increased by his neighbour's shrieks : and 
the amazement that all the world shall be in shall unite as the sparks of a 



JEREMY TAYLOR. 227 

" An imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the 
decorations which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to 
verse ; a warm tone of piety, sweetness, and charity ; an accumula- 
tion of circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, 
or describes ; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation, till his 
sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all 
other writers, and especially from those of classical antiquity, never 
before so redundantly Scattered from the pulpit, distinguish Taylor 
from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of 
his successors by their kind. His sermons on the Marriage Ring, 
on the House of Feasting, on the Apples of Sodom, may be named 
without disparagement to others, which perhaps ought to stand in 
equal place. But they are not without considerable faults, some of 
which have just been hinted. The eloquence of Taylor is great ; 
but it is not eloquence of the highest class : it is far too Asiatic, too 

raging furnace into a globe of fire, and roll on its own principle, and in- 
crease by direct appearances and intolerable reflections. He that stands 
in a churchyard in the time of a great plague, and hears the passing-bell 
perpetually telling the sad stories of death, and sees crowds of infected 
bodies pressing to their graves, and others sick and tremulous, and death 
dressed up in all the images of sorrow round about him, is not supported in 
his spirit by the variety of his sorrow. And at Doomsday, when the ter- 
rors are universal, besides that it is itself so much greater, because it can 
affright the whole world, it is also made greater by communication and a 
sorrowful influence ; grief being then strongly infectious, when there is no 
variety of state, but an entire kingdom of fear : and amazement is the king 
of all our passions, and all the world its subjects : and that shriek must needs 
be terrible, when millions of men and women at the same instant shall fear- 
fully cry out, and the noise shall mingle with the trumpet of the archangel, 
with the thunders of the dying and groaning heavens, and the crack of the 
dissolving world, when the whole fabric of nature shall shake into dissolu- 
tion and eternal ashes. 

But this general consideration may be heightened with four or five cir- 
cumstances. 

First, consider what an infinite multitude of angels, and men, and Avomen, 
shall then appear. It is a huge assembly, when the men of one kingdom, 
the men of one age in a single province, are gathered together into heaps 
and confusion of disorder ; but then, all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies 
that ever mustered, all the world that Augustus Cajsar taxed, all those hun- 
dreds of millions that were slain in all the Eoman wars, from Numa's time 
till Italy was broken into principalities and small exarchates ; all these, and 
all that can come into numbers, and that did descend from the loins of 
Adam, shall at once be represented : to which account it we add the armies 
of heaven, the nine orders of blessed spirits, and the infinite numbers in every 
order, we may suppose the numbers fit to express the majesty of that God, 
and the terror of that Judge, who is the Lord and Father of all that unimag- 
inable multitude. Erit terror ingens tot simul tcmtorumque populorum. 



228 THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 

much in tlie style of Chrysostom and other declauners of the fourth 
century, by the study of whom he had probably vitiated his taste. 
His learning is ill-placed, and his arguments often as much so ; not 
to mention that he has the common defect of alleging nugatory 
proofs. His vehemence loses its effect by the circuity of his pleon- 
astic language : his sentences are of endless length, and hence not 
only altogether unmusical, but not always reducible to grammar. 
But he is still the greatest ornament of the English pulpit up to the 
middle of the seventeenth century ; and we have no reason to be- 
lieve, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that he had any compe- 
titor in other languages." * 

8. Many distinguished theologians, whose writings were en- 
thely controversial, or not eminent as literary compositions, must 
be allowed to pass unnoticed. But we are not deviating from the 
order of time, m here naming two learned controversialists whose 
fame has survived their own age. The one, commonly known as 
" the ever-memorable John Hales of Eton," busied himself chiefly 
in attacking the ecclesiastical system, of which Andrewes had been 
the most skilful defender, and Laud the most active promoter. The 
other, WOliam ChiUing-worth, has been declared by Locke and 
Eeid to have been one of the best of all reasoners. The work 
which preserves his memory, " The Religion of Protestants a Safe 
Way to Salvation," is directed against Romanism, especially im- 
pugning the authority of tradition and maintaining the sufficiency 
of Scripture. 

These names introduce us to the theological writings of the 
Com^monwealth and Protectorate, which, however, do by no means 
possess a Kterary importance comparable with that of the preceding 
times. The Puritan divines, with few exceptions, found occupation 
more than enough, in the share they now took in public affairs, and 
in the contests which sprang out of their own diversities of opin- 
ion. Some of the ablest among them wrote no works that possess 
general interest : some, like Calamy, the leader, for a time at least, 
of the Presbyterians, hardly wrote any thing at all. Others, like- 
wise, whose time of action came chiefly after the Restoration, will 
then present themselves under another name. 

But to the age of our illustrious ancients belonged distinctively, 
in spirit as well as in manner, in thought as well as in style, the 
celebrated man who. Hall and Taylor and other churchmen having 
in the meantime been put to silence, was beyond all doubt the in- 
tellectual chief of the theologians belonging to the close of our great 
period. 

* Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe. 



RICHARD BAXTER. 229 

h. 1615. > The name of Ricliard Baxter would claim a place in 
d. 1691. \ the literary history of his time, although the topics on 
which his great talents were employed had been the most trifling 
of all, instead of being, as they were, the most momentous. 
Filling many volumes, wiitten with ceaseless haste, produced in 
continual pam of body and not infrequent persecution and trouble, 
expressed with the clumsiness of a writer who understood little 
about laws of style and cared still less, and flowing from a mind 
whose knowledge was very various but nowhere very exact, they 
are the monuments of an indomitable energy of purpose that has 
never been surpassed : and not less extraordinary are they in 
the combination of faculties and capacities which they evince, 
powers indeed so diverse, and used with so unsparing a readi- 
ness, that the work is often all the worse in general effect for 
the very fuhiess of the intellect by which it was dictated. If 
Andrewes, with modern discipline, would probably have been one 
of the greatest of English orators, Baxter might certainly, had 
he so wiUed it, have bequeathed to us either consummate master- 
pieces of impressive eloquence, or records of philosophic thought 
unsurpassed in analytic subtlety. But the pastor of Kidderminster 
lived, not for worldly fame or the pleasure of intellectual exertion, 
but for the teaching of what he held to be truth, and for the service 
of the Maker in whose presence he every hour expected to stand. 
His thoughts were hurried forward, too quickly for clear exposi- 
tion, by the eager impetuosity of his temperament : and they were con- 
fined, by his overwhelming sense of religious responsibility, to a track 
which admitted too few accessory and illustrative ideas. All his 
writings, as he himself has told us, were set down with the haste of 
a man who, remembering that he laboured under mortal disease, 
never counted on finishimg the page he had begun. 

When regarded merely in a literary view, his works are sur- 
prising fruits of circumstances so unfavourable. But they have in 
themselves very great value, both for their originality and acute- 
ness of thought, and for their vigorous and passionate though very 
unpolished eloquence. Nor can any thing be finer than the tone 
of piety which sheds its halo over them, or the courageous in- 
tegrity with which the writer now probes every alleged truth to its 
roots, and now turns back to acknowledge and retrieve his own 
errors. 

His vast mass of polemical tracts, and the few treatises in which, 
as in his Latin " Method of Theology " and his English " Catholic 
Theology," he expounds systematically his peculiar views of Chris- 
tian doctrine, are declared, by those who have studied them, to give 



230 THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 

decisive evidence of his intellectual power. Perhaps the most 
interesting of all his writings is the posthumous memoir of " Memor- 
able Passages of his Life and Times." It is especially admirable 
as a narrative of the progress and changes of religious opinion and 
sentiment, in a mind robust both m iatellect and ia passion. His 
Sermons, always irregular in style and often positively vulgar, 
abound in passages of great oratorical strength : in truth, it is one 
of the most remarkable points about this remarkable man, that, in 
starting so many original thoughts, and in tracing out their conse- 
quences with such fulness of inference and such refinement of analy- 
sis, he should yet have been able to rivet the attention and arouse 
the feelings of a congregation as we know him to have done. But, 
when we read his pulpit-orations, we cannot be surprised by the 
great effect they produced. 

No religious books better deserve their popularity than some of 
his Practical Treatises, especially those that are best known, " The 
Saints' Everlasting Eest " and " The Call to the Unconverted." 
They exhibit the essence, both of his eloquence and of his think- 
ing, as clearly as the Sermons ; and in point of language they are 
much better. But they must not be judged from modern abridg- 
ments, the very best of which are to them what the skeleton is to 
the statue. None of our old divines will bear being abridged : 
and the plan of Baxter's works, embracing a multiplicity of par- 
ticulars, each of which is essential to the symmetry of the whole, 
is such as to make them less susceptible of the process than most 
others of their class. 

RICHARD BAXTER. 
From " The Saints' Everlasting Best"^Uis7iedin 1650. 
Why dost thou look so sadly on those withered limhs, and on that pining 
body ? Do not so far mistake thyself, as to think its joys and thine are all one ; 
or that its prosperity and thine are all one ; or that they must needs stand or 
fall together. When it is rotting and consuming in the grave, then shalt 
thou he a companion of the perfected spirits of the just ; and, when those 
bones are scattered about the churchyard, then shalt thou be praising God in 
rest. And, in the meantime, hast not thou food of consolation which the 
flesh knoweth not of, and a joy which this stranger meddleth not with ? And 
do not think that, when thou art turned out of this body, thou shalt have no 
habitation. Art thou afraid thou shalt wander destitute of a resting-place ? 
Is it better resting in flesh than in God ? * * Dost thou think that those 
souls, which are now with Christ, do so much pity their rotten or dusty 
corpse, or lament that their ancient habitation is ruined and their once comely 
bodies turned into earth ? Oh, what a thing is strangeness and disacquaint- 
ance ! It maketh us afraid of our dearest friends, and to draw back from the 
place of our only happiness. So was it with thee towards thy chiefest friends 
on earth : while thou wast unacquainted with them, thou didst withdraAV 



RICHARD BAXTER. 231 

from their society ; but, when thou didst once know them throughly, thou 
wouldst have been loath again to he deprived of their fellowship. And even 
so, though thy strangeness to Grod and to another world do make thee loath 
to leave this flesh ; yet, when thou hast been but one day or hour there, (if 
we may so speak of that Eternity, where is neither day nor hour,) thou 
would be full loath to return to this flesh again. Doubtless when God, for 
the glory of his Son, did send back the soul of Lazarus into its body, 
He caused it quite to forget the glory which it had enjoyed, and to leave be- 
hind it the remembrance of that happiness together with the happiness itself : 
or else it might have made his life a burden to him, to think of the blessed- 
ness that he was fetched from ; and have made him ready to break down the 
prison-doors of his flesh, that he might return to that happy state again. 



232 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SIlAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 



CHAPTEE Y. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

A.D. 1558— A.D. 1660. 

SECTION THIRD : • THE MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE. 

Semi-Theological Writeks. 1, Fuller's "Works— Cudworth—Hemy More. 
— Philosophical Wkitees. 2. Lord Bacon— The Design of his Philoso- 
phy—His Two Problems— His Chief Works.— 3. Hobbes— His Political 
and Social Theories — His Ethics — His Psychology — His Style. — Histor- 
ical Writers, 4. Social and Political Theories — Antiquaries — Histo- 
rians — Ealeigh — Milton's History of England — His Historical and Po- 
lemical Tracts — His Style. — Miscellaneous Writers. 5. Writers of 
Voyages and Travels — Literary Critics — Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of 
Poesy — Eomances and Novels — Sidney's Arcadia — Short Novels — Greene 
— Lyly — Pamphlets — Controversy on the Stage — Martin Mar-Prelate — 
Smectymnuus. — 6. Essays describing Characters — Didactic Essays — 
Bacon's Essays — Selden — Burton — Sir Thomas Browne — Cowley's Essays. 

SEMI-THEOLOGICAL "WRITERS. 

1. In passing from theology to other quarters, we may allow 
ourselves to be introduced by one of the most eloquent preachers 
of Charles's time, a man who was accustomed to have two audi- 
ences, the one seated in the church, the other listening eagerly 
through the open windows. 

1. 1608. ■) Thomas Fuller is most widely known through his " Wor- 
d. 1661. J thies of England." But he was a voluminous and various 
author, both of ecclesiastical and other works. He is the very 
strangest writer in our language. Perhaps no man ever excelled 
him in fulness and readiness of wit : certainly no man ever printed 
so many of his own jests. His joyousness overflows without ceas- 
ing, pouring forth good-natured sarcasms, humorous allusions, and 
facetious stories, and punning and ringing changes on words witli 
inexhaustible oddity of invention. His eccentricity found its way 
to his title-pages : " Good Thoughts in Bad Times," at an early 
stage of the war, were followed by " Good Thoughts in Worse 
Times : " and this series closed, at the Restoration, with " Mixed 
Contemplations in Better Times." If this were all, FuUer might 



THOMAS FULLER. 233 

be worthless. But the light-hearted jester was one of the most in- 
dustrious of inquirers : we owe to him an immense number of 
curious facts, collected from recondite books, from an extensive 
correspondence kept up on purpose, and from researches which 
went on most actively of aU while he wandered about as a chaplain 
in the royal army. In his "Worthies," the only book of his that 
is now valuable as an authority, he is hardly anything else than a 
lively and observant gossip. But elsewhere he is more ambitious. 
Though he has little vigour of reasoning, and no wide command of 
principles, his teeming fancy presents every object in some new 
light ; oftenest evolving ludicrous images, but often also guided by 
serious emotion. His " Church-History of Britain," his " History of 
the Holy War," (that is the Crusades,) and his " Pisgah-View of 
Palestine," have no claim to be caUed great historical compositions ; 
but they are inimitable collections of spiritedly told stories : and m 
the portraits of character, the short . biographies, and the pithy 
maxims, which make up his "Holy State" and "Profane State," 
he is, more than anywhere, shrewd, amusing, instructive, and often 
eloquent. His style is commendable, if compared with that which 
was common in his time : his goodness and piety were real, in spite 
of his ungovernable levity : he was a kindly man, a peacemaker in 
the midst of strife : and his exuberant wit never struck harshly a 
personal enemy or an adverse sect.* 

* THOMAS FULLER. 

From " The Holy State ;" j)ubUshed in 1648. 

I. The true Church Antiquary is a traveller into former times, whence he 
hath learned their language and fashions. 1. He baits at middle Antiquity, 
but lodges not till he comes at that which is ancient indeed. 2. He desires to 
imitate the ancient Fathers, as well in their piety as in their postures ; not 
only conforming his hands and knees, but chiefly his heart, to their pattern. 
Oh, the holiness of their living and painfulness of their preaching ! How 
full were they of mortified thoughts and heavenly meditations ! Let us not 
make the ceremonial part of their lives only canonical, and the moral part 
thereof altogether apocrypha ; imitating their devotion, not in the fineness of 
the stuff, but only in the fashion of the making. 3. He carefully marks the 
declination of the church from the primitive purity ; observing how, some- 
times, humble Devotion was contented to lie down, whilst proud Supersti- 
tion got on her back. 4. He doth not so adore the Ancients as to despise the 
Modern. Grant them but dwarfs : yet stand they on giants' shoulders, and 
may see the farther. Sure as stout champions of Truth follow in the 
rear, as ever marched in the front. Besides, as one excellently observes, 
Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi. These times are the ancient times, when 
the world is ancient ; and not those which we count ancient by a computa- 
tion backwards from ourselves. 

II. In Building we must respect Situation, Contrivance, Eeceipt, Strength, 



234 CHARLES THE FIRST AND THE COMMONWEALTH. 

Two contemporaries of Fuller, eminent in theology, were stiU 
more so in Philosophy. Regarding existence from that lofty and 
spiritual point of view which had been taken up anciently by Plato, 
both Ralph Cudworth and Henry More are among the few instances 
of deviation from the track which English speculation has in mod- 
em times chiefly followed, and into which the two most celebrat- 
ed philosophers of their own day co-operated in leading it. They 
are alike opposed to the empirical tendencies which lay hidden in the 
theories of Bacon, and to the sensualistic doctrines that were more 
du'ectly developed by Hobbes. Cud worth's " True Intellectual Sys- 
tem of the Universe," a work which has been very diversely estimated, 
has for its chief aim the confuting, on a priori principles, the system 
of Atheism: its ethical appendix is directed against the selfish 
theory of morals. More's works, very fine pieces both of thinking 
and of eloquence, are still more deficient in clearness than those of 
his friend : he loses himself in a twofold labyrinth of New-Platonism 
and Rabbinical learning. 

In the generation before the two Oxford friends, we find the 
meditative sceptic Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose writings, 
though unfortunately teaching different lessons from theu's, resemble 
them in then* deviation from the prevalent turn of thinking. 



and Beauty. 1. Chiefly choose a good air. For air is a dish one feeds on 
every minute ; and therefore it need be good. "Wood and water are two staple 
commodities where they may be had. The former I confess hath made so 
much iron, that it must now be bought with the more silver, and grows 
daily dearer. But 'tis as well pleasant as profitable, to see a house cased with 
trees, like that of Anchises in Troy. Next a pleasant prospect is to be 
respected. A medley view (such as of water and land at Greenwich) best 
entertains the eyes, refreshing the wearied beholder with exchange of objects. 
Yet I know a more profitable prospect ; where the owner can only see his 
own land round about. 2. A fair entrance with an easy ascent gives a great 
grace to a building : where the hall is a preferment out of the court, the 
parlour out of the hall ; not as in some old buildings, where the doors are so 
low pigmies must stoop, and the rooms so high that giants may stand up- 
right. Light, Heaven's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building ; 
yet it shines not alike from all parts of heaven. An east window welcomes 
the infant beams of the sun before they are of strength to do any harm, and 
is offensive to none but a sluggard. In a west window, in summer-time 
towards night, the sun grows low and over-familiar, Avith more light than 
delight. * * * 3. As for receipt, a house had better be too little for a 
day, than too great for a year. And it's easier borrowing of thy neighbour 
a brace of chambers for a night, than a bag of money for a twelvemonth. 
4. As for strength, country-houses must be substantives, able to stand of 
themselves. 5. Beauty remains behind as the last to be regarded ; because 
houses are made to be lived in, not looked on. * * * 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF BACON. 235 



PHILOSOPHICAL WKITERS. 



2. At the extremes of our period we encounter, in the Philo- 
sophical field, two of the strongest thinkers thart have appeared in 
Modern Europe. Francis Bacon's smaller wi-itings belong to the last 
years of the sixteenth century, his great efforts to the reign of 
James : Thomas Hobbes, beginning to write in the reign of Charles 
the First, continued to do so for many years after the Eestoration, 
h. 1561. \ Some of Bacon's minor writings will come in our way by 
d. 1626. ) and by, and wUl exemplify that union of wide reflection with 
strong imagination, which, while it gave its character to his philos- 
ophy, was not less active in its eifect on his style. In the mean- 
time, we are concerned with those efforts of his for aidmg in the 
discovery of truth, which have made his name immortal in the 
records of modern science. 

An attempt at exactly expounding the philosophy of Bacon 
would here be as much out of place, as it would be to aim at 
accountiag for the differences of opinion that have arisen as to the 
value of his doctrines. But we may prepare ourselves for under- 
standing his position in the history of intellect, if we consider him 
as having aimed at the solution of two great problems. The answers 
to these were intended to constitute the " Instauratio Magna," the 
Great Restoration of Philosophy, that colossal work, towards which 
the chief writings of. the illustrious author were contributions. 

The first problem was, an Analytic Classification of all Depart- 
ments of Human Knowledge ; the laying down, as it were, of an 
intellectual map, in which all arts and sciences should be exhibited 
in their relation to each other, then- bomidaries being distinctly 
marked off, the present state of each being indicated, and hints 
being given for the correction of errors and the supplying of defici- 
encies. Imperfect and erroneous as his scheme may be allowed to 
be, D'Alembert and his French coadjutors, in the middle of last 
century, were able to do no more than copy and distort it. The 
accomplishment of the task which Bacon undertook, at a time 
when materials enough had not been amassed, is now beginning to 
be acknowledged as one of the weightiest desiderata in philosophy. 
It has anew been attempted, in its whole compass, by two power- 
ful though h-regular thinkers of our century, the one in France, 
the other in England : and it has been prosecuted very success- 
fully in the physical sciences, especially by Whewell and Ampere. 

This part of Bacon's speculations may be studied by the Eng- 
lish reader, in his own eloquent exposition of it. It occupies, 



236 THE REIGN OF JAMES THE FIRST. 

chiefly though not wholly, his treatise " On the Advancement of 
Learning." Desiring, however, to make his opinions accessible to 
all learned men in Europe, he caused the book, with large additions, 
to be translated into Latin, under the title " De Augmentis Scienti- 
arum." 

In the same language only did he teach the other sections of his 
system. The most important of these he called the " Novum Or- 
ganum," challenging, in the courageous self-confidence of genius, a 
comparison with the ancient " Organon," the logical text-book of 
Aristotle. In this treatise mainly it is, that he expounds the me- 
thods he proposed for solving the second of his problems. This is 
the portion of his speculations which has been most studied, and 
which has given rise to the greater part of the controversies in re- 
gard to the value of his philosophy. The design on which he 
worked may easily be understood. 

The " Novum Organum" is a contribution to Logic, the science 
which is the theory of the art of Eeasoning : it undertakes to 
supply certain deficiencies, under which the Ancient or Aristotelian 
Logic admittedly labours. In all sciences, mental as well as phy- 
sical, the premises on which we found are of such a character, that 
we are in a greater or less degree liable, in reasoning from them, to 
infer more than they warrant. The ancient logic is able to show 
that such inferences are bad, as involving, in. one way or another, the 
logical fallacy of mferring from a part to the whole : but it is 
powerless when, presenting to it several conclusions, all invalidly 
inferred, none of them certainly true, but aU of them in themselves 
more or less probable, we ask it to aid us in determining their com- 
parative probability. What Bacon did was this. He endeavour- 
ed to purify our reasoning from such premises, by subjecting it to a 
system of checks and counter-checks, which should have the effect, 
not indeed of totally expunging the error of the conclusion, but of 
making it as small as possible, and of reducing it in many cases to 
an inappreciable minimum. This is, on the one side, the purpose 
of those laws by which he guards our assumption of premises, as in 
his famous exposition of the "idols" or prejudices of the human 
mind : and it is also, on the other side, the use designed to be 
served by the rules he lays down, for determining the comparative 
sufficiency of given instances as specimens of the whole class in re- 
gard to which we wish to draw inferences fi'om them. 

The perfect solution of this ambitious problem is unattainable ; 
but, in every science, progress wUl be proportional to the extent 
to which the partial solution is carried. In the physical sciences it 
may be worked out very far ; and, in this wide region of knowledge. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOBBES. 237 

not only were Bacon's principles happily accordant with the turn 
which philosophy was about to take, but the spu-it and the details of 
his system alike chimed in with the practical and cautious temper 
of the English nation. It cannot well be doubted, that his writings, 
though they received in his lifetime the neglect for which he proudly 
prepared himself, gave a mighty impulse to scientific thinking for at 
least a century after him. It is perhaps equally certain that, even 
in the philosophy of corporeal things, discovery has now reached a 
point, at which Bacon's methods are much less extensively useful ; 
and, in our own country, as well as abroad, some of the most active 
minds have lately begun to aim at fitting new instruments to the 
strong and flexible hand of modern science. 

3. On philosophy in England, though not in Scotland, the influ- 
h. 1588.) ^"^^^ of Hobbes has been much greater than that of Bacon. 
£f. 1679. j In our own generation his memory has profited, more 
largely than that of almost any other philosopher, by that prevalent 
disposition, half-paradoxical, half-generous, which has resuscitated 
so many defunct celebrities, and given defenders to so many opin- 
ions that used to be universally condemned as dangerous or false. 

Some of his doctrines, and these making the very key-stone of his 
system, are not vindicated by any one. Wlien he lays down his 
political theory of uncontrolled absolutism ; and when, with strict 
consistency, he desires to subject rehgion and morality themselves 
to the will of the sovereign : his most zealous admirers content 
themselves with interpreting him for the better, in a fashion remind- 
ing one of that which has been adopted, in a more plausible case, by 
the excusers of Machiavelli. By the writer himself, all his other 
speculations seem to have been intended as merely subordinate to 
the social system which he thus expounded : into his great political 
treatise, the " Leviathan," he incorporated all those minor in- 
quiries, which we may read elsewhere also both in his English 
and in his Latin works. 

His Ethical Theory, which resolves all our impulses regarding 
right and wrong into Self-love, does, however objectionable in itself, 
admit of being brought, by convenient accommodations, within no 
very great distance of the utilitarian theories of morals which have 
generally been the most popular in England. Unprejudiced read- 
ers will be more likely to agree in then- estimate of the services he 
has rendered to other branches of mental philosophy. Always 
tending, if not more than tendmg, towards that metaphysical school 
which derives all human knowledge from without, and which issues 
in making reason and conscience alike subject to the senses, he is 



238 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

yet, for those who can use his hints aright, one of the most instruc- 
tive of teachers in Psychology. What he has written on the 
Association of Ideas, is among the most valuable contributions that 
have ever been rendered to this branch of science : nor are there 
anywhere wanting masterly pieces of analysis. He has also used 
his skill of reflective dissection, with great effect, in his treatise on 
Logic. The patient accuracy with which he observed mental phe- 
nomena, seldom led astray unless when he was mastered by some 
favourite and deep-rooted idea, has justly been commended by the 
celebrated critic whose opinion of his language will immediately be 
quoted ; and who is not indisposed to claim for Hobbes the honour, 
assigned by Dugald Stewart to Descartes, of having been the father 
of Experimental Psychology. 

In his reasoning, Hobbes is admirably close and consistent. If 
we grant his premises, it is hardly ever possible to question his con- 
clusions : and it is always easy, if attention be given, to trace every 
step by which the process of inference is carried on. In style, he 
has all the excellence which is compatible with a profound sluggish- 
ness of imagination, and a total want of emotive power. It has justly 
been said to be the perfection of mere didactic language. In the 
history of our literature, too, he deserves commemoration as one of 
the earliest of those writers who were distinguished, negatively, by 
the general absence of great faults in stjde. " Hobbes is perhaps the 
first of whom we can say that he is a good English writer. For 
the excellent passages of Hooker, Sidney, Ealeigh, Bacon, Taylor, 
Chillingworth, and others of the Elizabethan or the first Stuart 
period, are not sufficient to establish their claun ; a good writer 
being one whose composition is nearly uniform, and who never 
sinks to such inferiority or negligence as we must confess in most 
of these. Hobbes is clear, precise, spirited, and, above aU, free in 
general from the faults of his predecessors : his language is sen- 
sibly less obsolete : he is never vulgar, rarely, if ever, quaint or 
pedantic." * 

HISTORICAL WRITERS. 

4. We have dwelt long in the company of our Old Divines, men 
who not only were the most eloquent prose writers of their time, 
but influenced their contemporaries more powerfully than any gen- 
eration has since been influenced by theology, whether from the press 

* Hallam : Literature of Europe. 



POLITICAL SCIENCE, ANTIQUITIES, AND HISTOEY. 239 

or from the pulpit. Nor have we been able to part very speedily 
from those two celebrated philosophers, who, living in a great age, 
communicated, for good or for evil, a strong impulse to the race 
that succeeded. Other departments in the Prose Literature of the 
period, though all were thickly filled, and several of them richly 
adorned, must be passed over with a haste which it is difficult 
not to be sorry for. 

Speculations on the Theory of Society and Civil Polity were 
frequent throughout the whole of our period. First may be named 
the Latin work, or rather Avorks, " On the State," by William 
Bellenden, a Scotsman, which have been restored to notice in 
modern times by Parr's famous Whig preface. Ideas on social 
relations were thrown into the shape of an English romance by 
Lord Bacon in his " New Atlantis ;" and Harrmgton, in his 
" Oceana," delineated an aristocratic republic in the same man- 
ner. The " Leviathan " of Hobbes may close this series. 

In the collection of materials for national history, the period was 
exceedingly active. Camden and Selden stand at the head of our 
band of Antiquaries ; and along with them may be named Spelman, 
Cotton, and Speed. Under this head also might be classed Arch- 
bishop Usher's valuable contributions to the Ecclesiastical Antiqui- 
ties and History of the country. 

Camden himself was an historian. So were several others whose 
names we encounter elsewhere : such as Bacon, whose " History of 
Henry the Seventh" is in no way very remarkable; the poets 
Daniel and Drummond ; and the many-sided Hobbes, who wrote 
in his old age " Behemoth, or a History of the Civil Wars." 
ICnolles's " Turkish History " has been pronounced, by some of our 
best critics, to be one of the most animated narratives which the 
language possesses. A little before its appearance, a " History of the 
World," from the Creation to the middle of the republican period 
of Rome, was composed in the Tower of London, by a man lying 
there under sentence of death. The case is parallel to the produc- 
tion of the great work of Boethius : and the name of the writer is 
z>. 1552. > better known in England. He was Sir Walter Raleigh : 
d.ieis.f and the work, while it displays so much learnmg as to 
have excited a suspicion probably ungrounded, is, in its fine and 
poetic eloquence, and its solemn thoughtfulness, at once worthy 
of the chivalrous author and touchingly suggestive of the circum- 
stances in which he stood. Though it is fuU of discussions, these 
are both striking and instructive : the narrative is often uncom- 
monly spirited ; and its tone of sadly devout sentiment justifies the 



240 THE COMMONWEALTH AND PEOTECTOEATE. 

honour that was paid to it by Bishop Hall, in citing it as a signal 
instance of the blessed uses of adversity.* 

Towards the close of the period, while Lord Clarendon was col- 
lecting the materials for his famous royahst history, Thomas May 
was writing, in the opposite interest, the " History of the Parha- 
ment." His work is less polished or eloquent than his poetical 
tastes might have led us to expect. Then, likewise, amidst more 
exciting and angry labours, John Milton recorded the early tradi- 
tions of our country in his " History of England." To real histor- 
ical value no claim could be made by a work, treating the Eoman 
and Anglo-Saxon periods with the means then accessible. But 
there reigns through it a spkit of discriminating acuteness, uniting 
not inharmoniously with the animated pleasure inspu'ed in the 
poet's mind by the heroic adventures he contemplates. 

But, in no instance throughout that distm*bed time, would those, 
who should look no further than the literary results of intellect. 
&. 1608.1 ^^ ^^^^^ reason as in the case of Milton, for lamenting the 
d.i674:.j absorption of extraordinary power in controversies be- 
tween sects and parties. Some of us indeed will believe that the 
" Defence of the People of England," against the scurrility of an 
alien hheling, was, notwithstanding the heavy misdoings of the 
nation or its chiefs, a duty in the performance of which the highest 
genius and learning might be not unworthily employed. Others may 
rejoice, on similar grounds, in the strenuous toil with which the 
poet laboured in attacks on the hierarchy. But there are several of 

"* SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 

From'''- The History of iJie World ;" jpuUisTiedin 1614:. 

History hath triumphed over Time, which, hesides it, nothing but Eter- 
nity hath triumphed over : for it hath carried our knowledge over the vast 
and devouring space for so many thousand years, and given to our mind 
such fail' and piercing eyes, that we plainly behold living now, as if Ave had 
lived then, that great world, Magni Dei sapiens opus, the wise work, says 
Hermes, of a Great God, as it was then when but new in itself. By it it is, 
I say, that we live in the very time when it was created. We behold how 
it was governed ; how it was covered with waters and again repeopled ; how 
kings and kingdoms have flourished and fallen ; and for what virtue and 
piety God made prosperous, and for what vice and deformity he made 
wretched, both the one and the other. And it is not the least debt which 
we owe unto history, that it hath made us acquainted with our dead ances- 
tors, and out of the depth and darkness of the earth delivered us their mem- 
ory and fame. In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less 
wise than eternal, by the comparison and application of other men's forepast 
miseries with our own like errors and ill-deservings. 



THE PROSE WRITINGS OF MILTON. 241 

his polemical writings which had little value, even in leading or en- 
lightening the opinions of his contemporaries ; and of those which 
had that effect, two only need to be named. The royalists having, 
after King Charles's death, published the " Eikon BasUike," or 
" Eoyal Image," a clever collection of spurious meditations said to 
have been written by the unfortunate prince in his imprisonment, 
Milton dissected the book in his " Eikonoklastes," or " Image- 
breaker," with great force both of reasoning and eloquence, but 
with, a painful want of forbearance towards the unhappy deceased. 
It is with different feelings that we turn to his " Areopagitica, a 
Speech to the Parhament of England, for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing." This defence of the freedom of the press, triumphant 
in argument, is one of the noblest and most impressive pieces of 
eloquence in the English tongue. It may likewise be noted, that 
the more sedate " Tractate on Education," composed about the 
same time, aimed likewise, among other objects, at the end de- 
signed in the oration ; the convmcing of the dominant party in the 
state, that the suppression of opinions by force was as wrong in 
them as it had been in those whom they displaced. These two 
treatises give, in dissimilar shapes, sufl&cient specimens of Milton's 
extraordinary power in prose writing. His style is more Latinized 
than that of his most eloquent contemporaries : the exotic mfection 
pervades both his terms and his arrangement ; and his quaintness 
is not that of the old idiomatic English. Yet he has passages 
marvellously sweet, and others in which the grand sweep of his 
sentences emulates the cathedral-music of Hooker.* 

* JOHN MILTON. 

From " Areopagitica: a Speech for the Ldherty of Unlicensed Printing f 
published in 1644. 

I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and common- 
wealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves, as well as men ; 
and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as male- 
factors : for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny 
of life in them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are ; nay, 
they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living 
intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously pro- 
ductive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth ; and, being sown up and down, may 
chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wari- 
ness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book : who kills a man 
kills a reasonable creature, God's image ; but he who destroys a good book 
kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man 
lives a burden to the earth ; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a 
master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 
It is true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss ; 



242 THE AGE OF SPENSES, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 



MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS. 

o. The miscellaneous writings of our eighty years must not be 
allowed to detain us very long. Such was their variety of form and 
matter, and so great the ability expended on them, that many pages 
might be filled by a mere description of their kinds, and the bare 
names of those who wrote, m. each, something that is interesting to 
the student of literary history. We must content ourselves with 
learning a few facts, under each of a very few heads. 

First may be commemorated briefly Hakluyt and Purchas, our 
earliest collectors of accounts of voyages ; with several travellers 
who told their own tale, such as Davis, the celebrated navigator, 
Sandys, whose name we shall meet in the poetical file, and the 
garrulous and amusing Howell. 

After these may stand the Literary Critics, chiefly for the sake 
b. 1554. ) of the earliest among them, the accomplished Sk Philip 
d. 1586.J Sidney. His " Defence of Poesy," wi'itten in 1581, is an 
eloquent and high-minded tribute to the value, moral and intellec- 
tual, of the most powerful of all the literary arts. In regard to the 
distinctive function and character of poetry, it rather evinces fine 

and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the 
want of which whole nations fare the worse. 

****** 
We boast our light : but, if we look not wisely on the sun iteelf, it smites 
us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are oft combust, and 
those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and set with the sun, until the 
opposite motion of their orbs bring them to such a place in the firmament 
where they may be seen evening or morning ? The light which we have 
gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward 
things more remote from our knowledge. 

****** 

Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, en- 
compassed and surrounded with His protection. The shop of war hath not there 
more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments 
of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and 
heads there sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving 
new notions and ideas, wherewith to present, as with their homage and their 
fealty, the approaching reformation. * * Methinks I see in my 
mind a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after 
sleep, and shaking her invincible locks : methinks I see her as an eagle 
renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid- 
day beam ; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain itself 
of heavenly radiance ; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, 
with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she 
means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and 
schisms. 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE. 243 

intuition, than lays down clear doctrines ; but perhaps it did all 
that could have been hoped for at the time when it appeared.* 

Puttenham's " Art of English Poesie," published five years later, 
has dawnings of critical principles, and, though far from being elo- 
quent, is a creditable attempt at regularity in prose composition. 
Of his contemporary Webbe it needs only to be said, that he is a 
vehement advocate of the experiment which then endangered our 
poetry, of adapting to our tongue the classical metres. A part in 
one of the prose treatises of Ben Jonson the dramatist entitles him 
to be ranked, with honour, among the earliest critical writers whose 
opinions were supported by philosophical thinking. 

Our next division will contain Eomances and Novels. Here, 
again, our list opens with Sir Philip Sidney. His " Arcadia" is a 
ponderous concatenation of romantic and pastoral incidents related 
in prose, many pieces of verse being interspersed, in imitation of 
the writer's Italian models. Enjoying a popularity which, long 
contiQuing to increase, paved the way for the wearisome French 
romances, it has in modern times received all varieties of estimate, 
from enthusiastic admiration to surly contempt. Unreadable as a 
whole by any but very warm lovers of genius, it is the unripe pro- 

* SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 

From the " Defence of Poesy : " written in 1581. 

There is no art delivered to mankind, that hath not the works of nature for 
its principal object ; without which they could not consist, and on which they 
so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will 
have set forth. * * Only the Poet, disdaining to be tied to any such 
subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth gTOw in 
effect into another nature ; in making things either better than nature bring- 
eth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, 
demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like : so as he goeth hand ia 
hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but 
freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the 
earth in so rich tapestry as diverse poets have done ; neither with so pleasant 
rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make 
the too-much-loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen : the poets only 
deliver a golden. Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison, to balance 
the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature. But rather give 
right honour to the Heavenly Maker of that maker ; who, having made man 
to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second 
nature ; which in nothing he showed so much as in poetry, when with the 
force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings ; with 
no small arguments to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam ; 
since our erect wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected 
will keepeth us from reaching unto it. 



244 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

duction of a young poet, and abounds in isolated passages alike 
beautiful in sentiment and in language. 

A little later, the press began to pour forth shoals of short novels 
and romances, sometimes collected into sets, and embracing both 
original compositions and translations. They were chiefly the 
hasty effusions of the readiest or most needy in that large crowd 
of professional authors, who abounded in London from about the 
beginning of our period, and among whom were nearly all the 
dramatists. The most indefatigable, and one of the most inge- 
nious, of these novel-writers, was the unfortunate play-writer, 
Hobert Greene ; one or two of whose pieces derive a painful in- 
terest from telling, doubtless with Byronic disguises, romantic but 
discreditable incidents in the author's dissipated career. From his 
novels, and others of the class, Shakspeare borrowed not a few of 
his plots. But the most whimsical of all of them were the two 
parts of a strange kind of novel, written by the dramatist Lyly : 
^'Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit;" and " Euphues his England." 
The affectations, both of thought and language, which were the 
staple of these exceedingly fashionable pieces, doubtless corrupted 
the diction of good society, and certainly were not without their 
effect on literature. Sir Percie Shafton's speeches, in " The Mon- 
astery," are a poor imitation of them : they may be better under- 
stood from the parodies of them in " Love's Labour Lost." This 
class of writings has no interest, calling for a further prosecution 
of their history. But they continued to be produced freely, till 
the civil war brought them to a stand. 

The Pamphlets of the time might deserve a chapter for them- 
selves. Written for the day, and to earn the day's bread, they treated 
every theme that arose, from public occurrences to private eccen- 
tricities, from historical facts to apocryphal marvels. From the 
beginning to the end, very many of them were polemical ; and this 
employment of them may be instanced from three controversies. 
The earliest of these regarded the moral lawfulness of the stage. 
It was keenly conducted, on both sides, from the time when Shak- 
speare's works began to appear, several of the smaller dramatists 
taking an active part in it : and it had not quite died away when, 
in the time of Charles the First, it was prosecuted in a more ambi- 
tious form by Prynne, who was punished so cruelly for the ani- 
madversions on the court, thrown out in his " Histriomastix" or 
" Player's Scourge." The second war of pamphlets raged in Queen 
Elizabeth's time. Its character is signified by the name of the imag- 
inary person who was the mouth-piece of one of the parties. He 
was called " Martin Mar-prelate." The third series of hostilities 



ESSAYS, DESCRIPTIVE AND DIDACTIC. 245 

might perhaps deserve a more dignified place, on account of the 
celebrity of some persons concerned in it. It was opened in the 
beginning of the Troubles, by the appearance of a pamphlet attack- 
ing episcopacy, and bearing the signature of Smectymnuus ; a name 
indicating by initials the names of the five presbyterian writers, 
among whom Edmund Calamy was the most famous. In the battle 
which followed. Bishop HaU fought on the one side, and John 
Milton on the other. 

6. A very large number of the Miscellaneous writings might be 
classed together as Essays : and the frequency and popularity of 
such attempts show how busy and restless men's minds were, and 
how widely thought expatiated over all objects of interest. A great 
many of these effusions assumed something like a dramatic shape, 
taking the form of descriptive sketches of character ; a fact, again, 
symptomatic of another feature of the times, that love of action 
and lively sympathy with practical energy, out of which the Old 
English Drama extracted the strength that inspired it. 

The two kinds of Essays, the Descriptive and the Didactic, may 
be considered separately. 

Small books of the former class, beginning to be written early in 
Elizabeth's reign, were abundant throughout the seventeenth cen- 
tury. They may have been suggested by Greek models ; but 
their cast was always original, and their tone very various. Of the 
lightest and least elevated kind was one of the earliest that can 
here be named, " The Gull's Hornbook", of the dramatist Dekker, 
which is a picture of low society in London, Of others, entertain- 
ing more serious aims, examples are furnished by sketches of Hall 
and Fuller, already mentioned. One of the most famous and lively 
books of the sort was the "Characters" of the unfortunate Sir 
Thomas Overbury, the dependent and victim of James's minion, 
Somerset: and among later attempts were the " Resolves" of Fel- 
tham, and the " Microcosmography" attributed to Bishop Earle. 

The Didactic series begins with a valuable work of a great man ; 
Bacon's fifty-eight " Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral." In 
this volume the active-minded writer sets down his thoughts on 
man and nature, on life and death, on religion and polity, on learning 
and art. It was a favourite work of his own, and has made his 
manner of thinking known to many who are ignorant of his sys- 
tematized philosophy. In the elaborated shape in which we read 
them, the Essays are not less attractive for the fulness of imagi- 
nation that fills them with stately pictures, than for the reach of re- 
flective thought that makes them suggest so many valuable truths. 
But it is a fact worth remembering, that the few Essays which were 



246 THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

first published, wanted almost altogether the illustrative enrichment 
■which the whole series now presents. This development of rea- 
soning power before imagination, although it is the exception, has 
several parallels : it was a distinctive feature in the mental history 
of Dryden and of Burke.* 

Among the Didactic Essays of the time after Bacon, may justly 
be included the " Table-Talk" of the learned Selden, not for the 
bulk of the book, but for its mixture of apophthegmatic wisdom 
and lively wit. Two of his contemporaries have transmitted to us 
in this shape a much greater number of words, if not a larger quan- 
tity of knowledge. Robert Burton's undigested farrago, called 
" The Anatomy of Melancholy," became famous on its being dis- 
covered that Sterne had stolen from it largely : and, as irregular in 
taste as in judgment, as far deficient in good writing as in power of 
consecutive reasoning, it can never do more than serving patient 
readers as a storehouse of odd learning and quaintly original ideas. 

* FRANCIS BACON. 

From the ^'■Essays: or Counsels Civil and Moral :" first puhlishedin 1597; 
revised and augmented till 1625. 

I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the 
Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a. Mind. And therefore 
God never wrought miracle to convince Atheism ; because his ordinary 
works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind 
to Atheism ; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to Eeli- 
gion : for, while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, 
it may sometimes rest in them and go no farther ; but, when it beholdeth 
the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Pro- 
vidence and Deity. * * The Scripture saith, " The fool hath said in his 
heart, there is no Grod :" it is not said, " The fool hath thought in his heart :" 
so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that 
he can thoroughly believe it or be persuaded of it. For none deny there is 
a Grod, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God. * * But 
the great Atheists, indeed, are hypocrites ; which are ever handling holy 
things, but without feeling. * * They that deny a God, destroy man's 
nobility : for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body : and, if he 
be not akin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It de- 
stroys likewise magnanimity and the raising of human nature : for, take an 
example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on 
when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God 
or Melior Natura : which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, with- 
out that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So 
man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon Divine protection and 
favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not 
obtain. Therefore, as Atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it 
depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty. 



ESSAYS OF BROWNE AND COWLEY. 247 

In some respects not unlike Burton, but very far above him both 
b. 1605. ■) i^ eloquence and m strength of thought, is Sir Thomas 
d. 1682. J Browne, the faTomite author of not a few among the ad- 
mirers of our older literature. In point of style, his writings pre- 
sent to us, in the last stage of our Old English period, all the dis- 
tinctive characteristics of the age in a state of extravagant exaggera- 
tion. The quaintness of phrase is more frequent and more deeply 
ingrained than ever : terms are corned from the Latui mmt with a 
licence that acknowledges no interdict ; and the construction of 
sentences puts on an added cumbrousness. But the thoughtful 
melancholy of feeling, the singular mixture of scepticism and cre- 
dulity in behef, and the brilliancy of imaginative illustration, give 
to his essays, and especially to that which has always been the 
most popular, a peculiarity of character that makes them exceed- 
ingly fascinating. " The Rehgio Medici," says Johnson, " was no 
sooner published, than it excited the attention of the pubhc by the 
novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession 
of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtlety of dis- 
quisition, and the strength of language."* 

Readers who delight m startling contrasts could not be more 
easily gratified, than by turning from Browne to the prose writmgs 
b. 1605. > of the poet Cowley. His eleven short " Discourses by way 
d. 1668. f of Essays, in Prose and Verse," the latest of aU his works, 
show an equal want of ambition in the choice of topics and in the 
manner of dealing with them. The titles, describmg objects of a 

* SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 

From the " HydriotapMa, or Urn-Burial : " published in 1648. 

Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and 
wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But tbe most magnanimous reso- 
lution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on 
the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which 
all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of con- 
tingency. Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made 
little more of this world than the world that was before it, while they lay 
obscure in the chaos of preordination and night of their fore-beings. 

To subsist in lasting monuments, to live m their productions, to exist in 
their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old 
expectations, and made one part of their elysiums. But all' this is nothing in 
the metaphysics of true belief. To live indeed is to be again ourselves ; 
which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one 
to lie in Saint Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt ; ready to be 
anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the 
moles of Adrianus. 



248 THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 

common- place kind, but possessing interest for every one, fulfil the 
promise which they hold out, by introducing us to a few obvious 
though judicious reflections, set off by a train of thoughtfully placid 
feeling. The style calls for especial attention. Noted in his 
poems for fantastic affectation of thought generating great obscurity 
of phrase, Cowley writes prose with undeviating simplicity and 
perspicuity: and the whole cast of his language, not in diction 
only, but in construction, has a smoothness and ease, and an ap- 
proach to tasteful regularity, of which hardly an instance, and cer- 
tainly none of such extent, could be produced from any other 
book written before the Eestoration.* 

* ABRAHAM COWLEY. 

From the Essay " Of Solitude. ^^ 

The first minister of state has not so much business in public, as a wise 
man has in private : if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has 
less leisure to be in company : the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, 
the other all the works of Grod and Nature under his consideration. There 
is no saying shocks me so much as that, which I hear very often, that a man 
does not know how to pass his time. 'Twould have been but ill spoken by 
Methusalem in the nine-himdred-sixty-ninth year of his life : so far it is 
from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any 
part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle 
for want of work. But this, you'll say, is work only for the learned : others 
are not capable either of the employments or divertisements that arrive from 
letters. I know they are not; and therefore cannot much recommend soli- 
tude to a man totally illiterate. But, if any man be so unlearned, as to want 
entertainment of the little intervals of accidental solitude, which frequently 
occur in almost all conditions, (except the very meanest of the people, who 
have business enough in the necessary provisions for life,) it is truly a great 
shame, both to his parents and himself. For a very small portion of any 
ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our time. Either musicj or 
painting, or designing, or chymistry, or history, or gardening, or twenty 
other things, will do it usefully and pleasantly ; and, if he happen to set his 
affections on Poetry, (which I do not advise him too immoderately,) that 
will overdo it : no wood will be thick enough to hide him from the importu- 
nities of company or business, which would abstract him from his beloved. 

Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good ! 

Hail, ye plebeian underwood, 

Where the poetic birds rejoice. 
And, for their quiet nests and plenteous food. 

Pay with their grateful voice ! 

Here Nature does a house for me erect, 

Nature the wisest architect. 

Who those fond artists does despise. 
That can the fair and living trees neglect, 

Yet the dead timber prize. 



Cowley's essays. 249 

Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, 

Hear the soft winds, above me flying, 

With all their wanton boughs dispute. 
And the more tuneful birds to both replying ; 

Nor be myself too mute. 

A silver sti-eam shall roll his waters near, 

Grilt with the sunbeams here and there, 

On whose enamell'd bank I '11 walk. 
And see how prettily they smile, and hear 

How prettily they talk. 

All wretched and too solitary he 

"Who loves not his own company ! 

He 11 feel the weight oft many a day, 
Unless he call in Sin or Vanity 

To help to bear 't away ! 



l2 



250 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON. 
A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE DRAMATIC POETRY. 

Introduction. 1. The Drama a Species of Poetry — Recitation of Narrative 
Poems and Plays — Effects of Recitation on the Character of the Works — 
Relations of Prose and Verse to Poetry. — 2. The Regular and Irregular 
Schools of Dramatic Art — The French Rules — The Unities of Time and 
Place— Their Principle— Their Effects.— 3. The Unity of Action— Its 
Principle — Its Relations to the Other Unities — The Union of Tragedy and 
Comedy. — Shakspeaee and the Old English Drama. 4. Its Four 
Stages. — 5. The First Stage — Shakspeare's Predecessors and Earliest 
Works — Marlowe — Greene. — 6. Shakspeare's Earliest Histories and 
Comedies — Character of the Early Comedies.— 7. The Second Stage — 
Shakspeare's Later Histories — His Best Comedies. — 8. The Third Stage 
— Shakspeare's Great Tragedies — His Latest Works.— 9. Estimate of 
Shakspeare's Genius. — Minor Dramatic Poets. 10. Shakspeare's Con- 
temporaries — Their Genius — Their Morality. — 11. Beaumont and Flet- 
cher. — 12. Ben Jonson, — 13. Minor Dramatists — Middleton — Wehster — 
Heywood — Dekker. — 14. The Fourth Stage of the Drama — Massinger^ — 
Ford— Shirley — Moral Declension. 

INTRODUCTION. 

1. SHAKSPEARE, the greatest of the great men who have created 
the imaginative literature of the English language, is so commonly- 
spoken of as a poet, that it can hardly surprise any of us to hear 
the name of Poetry given to such works as those amongst which 
his are classed. But we ought to make ourselves familiar with the 
principle which this way of speaking involves. 

The Drama, m all its kinds and forms, is properly to be consi- 
dered as a kind of Poetry. A Tragedy is a poem, just as much as 
an Epic or an Ode. It is not here possible, either to prove this 
cardinal doctrine of criticism, or to set it forth with those explana- 
tions by which the practical application of it ought to be guarded. 
It must be enough to assert peremptorily, that Spenser and Milton, 
our masters of the chivalrous and the religious epos, are not more 



THE NATURE OF DRAMATIC POETRY. 251 

imperatively subject to the laws of the poetical art, than are Shak- 
speare, and Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and the other 
founders and builders of our dramatic poetry. The Epic and the 
Drama are alike representations of human action and suffering, of 
human thought, and feeling, and desire ; and they are representa- 
tions whose purposes are so nearly akin, that the processes used are, 
amidst many secondary diversities, subject primarily to the same 
theoretical laws. 

Modern habits cause the Narrative poem and the Dramatic to 
wear a greater appearance of dissimilarity than they wore in older 
times. We consider the one as designed to be read, the other as 
designed to be acted. Before the invention of printing, and long 
afterwards, recitation was the mode of communication used for 
both. The romance, in which the poet told his tale in his own 
person, was chanted by the minstrel ; just as the morality or miracle- 
play, in which every word was put into the mouths of the charac- 
ters, was declaimed by the monks or their assistants. Our recol- 
lection of this fact suggests several considerations. It is exceedingly 
probable that the expectation, which our middle-age poets must 
have had, of this recitative use of their works, may have been one 
chief cause of the vigorous animation which atones for so many of 
their irregularities. It is at all events certam, that a similar feeling 
acted powerfully on those dramatic poets, whose progress we are 
now about to study. AU of them wrote for the stage : none of 
them, not even Shakspeare himself, wrote for the closet. Their 
having this design tended, beyond doubt, to lower the tone both 
of their taste and of their morality ; but as certainly it was the 
mainspring of their passionate elasticity, the principal source of the 
life-like energy which they poured into their di-amatic images of 
human life. 

Another doctrine also should be remembered, both for its own 
importance and for its bearing on the history of our dramatic litera- 
ture. Works which we are accustomed to call Poems are almost 
always written in verse. But the distinction between Verse and 
Prose, a distinction of form only, is no more than secondary : the 
primary character of a literary work depends on the purpose for 
which it is designed, the kind of mental state which it is mtended 
to excite in the hearers or readers. Consequently a work which, 
having a distinctively poetical purpose, is justly describable as a 
poem, would not cease to deserve the name, though it were to be 
couched in prose. It would, however, by being so expressed, lose 
much of its poetical power. The truth of this last assertion has been 
clearly perceived in all kinds of poetry except the dramatic. No 



252 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

one would dream of composing an ode in prose ; and the adoption 
of that form for a narrative poem is an experiment which, though 
it has been tried, as in the Telemachus of Fenelon, has never been 
successful. But metrical language has not always prevailed in 
the drama. In our own country, the example of Shakspeare has 
fortunately preserved Tragedy from the intrusion of prose : no man 
of genius has ever written an English tragic drama in any other 
form but that of verse; and even the infrequent intermixture of prose, 
in which our great dramatist indulges, has not found many imitators. 
But, with us as elsewhere, prose has gradually become almost uni- 
versal as the form of language in Comedy. Now, this class of dra- 
mas, by reason of its comparative lowness of purpose, has in its own 
nature a much stronger tendency than the other, to sink below the 
poetical sphere : and it is, in a degree yet greater, liable to that risk of 
moral corruption, by which the drama of Modern Europe has always 
been beset. Both of these dangers are aggravated by the use of 
prose. Comedy, on decisively adopting this form, not only loses 
more rapidly its poetical and imaginative character, but becomes 
more readily a minister and teacher of evil. The fact is pertinently 
illustrated by the state of the comic stage in the time of Charles the 
Second : and the better period with which we are at present engaged 
does not want proofs of it, proofs especially strong in their bearing 
on the moral part of the question. Even for Comedy, verse con- 
tinued to be the prevalent form of expression till the fall of the Old 
Drama : prose was introduced but occasionally, though oftener than 
in Tragedy. The poetical declension, however, caused by the writing 
of whole dramas in prose, is exemplified in comedies of Ben Jonson : 
and, of the coarse indecencies that deform so many of our old plays, 
a large majority (and those the worst) are written in prose, as if the 
poets had been ashamed to invest them with the garb of verse. 

2. Before beginning to consider the works of Shakspeare and his 
fellow-dramatists, we must still pause for a moment. They will be 
better understood if we know a little as to certain peculiarities, which 
distinguish the Old English Drama from that of some other nations. 

When our National Drama is described as Romantic, in contradis- 
tinction to the Classical Drama, whose masterpieces were framed in 
ancient Greece, principles are implied which relate to the poetical 
spirit and tone of the works, and which are applicable to all kinds 
of poetry. The inquiry into these lies beyond our competency. 

When the English Drama is called Irregular, and contrasted with 
the Regular Drama of Greece, and of modern France, the compari- 
son is founded on differences of form. In regard to these it is well 
we should learn something. The epithet given to our di-amatic 



THE DRAMATIC UNITIES. 253 

works intimates that they do not obey certain rules, which, it is 
alleged, are observed by those of the other class. We cannot here 
attempt to take account of the Greek Drama ; nor are we called on 
to do so. We know enough when we are told, that its forms were 
the models on which the French forms were founded ; but that, in 
more than one unportant respect, the true character of the ancient 
works was misapprehended by the imitators ; and that, especially, 
the drama of France became a thing very different from its supposed 
original, by refusing to adopt its chorus or lyrical element, while it 
adopted those other forms which had their just effect only when 
the chorus was used along with them. 

To criticise Shakspeare according to the French dramatic rules, 
is reaUy to judge him by a code of laws, which had not been en- 
acted when he wrote. The critics by whom the Parisian theory of 
dramatic art was systematized, belonged to the reign of Louis the 
Fourteenth : and Corneille, the earliest of the great dramatists of 
France, and himself hardly an adherent of the regular school, was 
a child when our poet died. Nevertheless the foreign standard has 
so often been applied to our old drama, that some knowledge of its 
principles is required by way of introduction ; and, indeed, the 
dramatic forms of Greece and Rome were neither quite unknown in 
Shakspeare's time nor altogether unimitated. 

The principal law of the French system prescribed obedience to 
the Three Unities, of Time, Place, and Action. 

The first two of these rest on a principle quite different from that 
which is involved in the third. They were founded on a desire 
to make each drama imitate as closely as possible the series of 
events which it represents. If this aim were to be prosecuted with 
strict consistency, the incidents constituting the story of a play 
ought to be such, that all of them, if real, might have occurred during 
the two or three hours occupied in the acting ; and, the stage 
actually remaining the same, the place of the action represented 
ought to remain unchanged from beginning to end. But, the com- 
position of a drama so cramped being the next thing to an impossi- 
bility, some relaxation of the statute was needed and allowed : the 
time of the action, it was decreed, (somewhat arbitrarily,) might 
extend to twenty-four hours ; and the scene might be shifted from 
place to place in the same city. By Shakspeare, on the other 
hand, and by most of his contemporaries, no fixed limits whatever 
were acknowledged, in regard either of time or of place. In some of 
his plays, though not in any of his greatest, the action stretches 
through many years : in all of them the scene is shifted frequently, 
and sometimes to very wide distances. 



254 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

Now, if the dramatic art has for its paramount aim the imparting 
to the spectators the pleasure which they may receive from con- 
templating exact imitations of reality, we ought surely to refuse 
to the dramatist even the slender concessions granted him by 
the French critics. If, on the contrary, the drama aims at im- 
parting some pleasure which is higher than this, the value of close 
adherence to reality ought to be estimated according to the effect 
which it may have in promoting that higher end. The latter is 
undoubtedly the true state of the case ; and, without insisting on 
having a very clear apprehension of the nature of the end really 
aimed at by the drama, we shall perhaps be disposed to believe that 
the attainment of that end may be impeded, equally, by a slavish imi- 
tation of the realities of time and place, and by a wanton and frequent 
deviation from them. If this is the tendency of our opinion, it will 
be strengthened by a glance at the thu-d section of the French law. 

3. The rule prescribmg unity of action, is founded on a principle 
much sounder than that which supports the other two. The phrase 
imports a requirement that the action or story of a di-ama shall be 
one, not two actions or more ; and that, by consequence, every 
thing introduced shaU be treated as subordinate to the series of 
events which is taken as the guiding thread. The doctrine tlius 
expounded is not only true, but holds in regard to every process by 
which we design to effect any change on the minds of others. Tlie 
poet, whether in narrative or dramatic composition, aims at con- 
veying to his audience such suggestions, as shall enable them to 
imagine for themselves promptly and vividly the series of events 
he describes, and to experience strongly the train of emotions which 
has passed through his own mind. It is a truth not only evident, 
but exemplified sometimes in the works of Shakspeare himself, 
that a total neglect of the unities of time and place exposes the 
poet to a risk of losing unity of action altogether ; or that, if it 
does not go so far as this, it issues in his having only a unity so 
complex and so little obvious, that the observer may find it difficult 
to grasp it, and may lose altogether the train of feeling which is 
intended to issue from the apprehension of it. Yet, in most of 
our great poet's works, and in not a few other dramas of his time, 
this unity of impression (as it has aptly been called) is not only pre- 
served with obvious mastery, but becomes instinctively percep- 
tible through the harmonious repose of feeling in which the work 
leaves us at its close. On the other hand, the punctilious observ- 
ance of the two minor unities does really not carry with it advan- 
tages so decisive as we might suppose. The imagination, the power 
appealed to, yields with wonderful flexibility when the poetic plea- 



THE DRAMATIC UNITIES. 255 

sure begins to dawn on the mind : and the prosaic scale of reality is 
utterly forgotten, unless critics dispel the dream of fancy by recall- 
ing it. Indeed it is further true, that the first and second unities, 
as managed in the French school, go much farther than the most out- 
rageous of our English licences, in impairing the general effect of 
the works. They carry with them, unless in a few felicitous in- 
stances, a bareness of story, a difficulty of devising means of fully 
developing passion and character, and a consequent necessity of 
constant recourse to little artificial expedients, which are disappoint- 
ingly apt to chill both fancy and emotion, in aU minds but those 
that are fortified by habitual prepossessions. 

There is another doctrine of the French school, to which our old 
dramatists paid still less regard than to the unities. It forbade the 
union of Tragedy and Comedy in the same piece. This prohibition 
is a practical corollary from the law which enjoms unity of action : 
but, like several other rules laid down in the same quarter, it 
violates the spuit of the law by formal adherence to the letter. 
Every drama ought to be characteristically either a tragedy or a 
comedy : a work as to which we are left in doubt whether it is the 
one or the other, cannot have produced either a forcible or an har- 
monious impression on us. There are instances in which it may 
fairly be doubted, whether Shakspeare himself has not thus failed. 
But there does not seem to be any good reason, why a work of the 
one class should not admit subordinate elements borrowed from 
the other. The refusal of the permission narrows very disadvan- 
tageously the field which tragedy is entitled to occupy, as a pic- 
ture of human life in which the serious and sad are reUeved by 
being contrasted with the gay : it lowers the tone of comedy, both 
in its poetical and in its moral relations. 

SHAKSPEARE AND THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

4. AU the events which we are caUed on here to notice in the 
history of the Old EngHsh Drama, are comprehended in a period 
of little more than sixty years, begimiing about 1585, and closing 
in 1645. Before the first of these dates, no very perceptible ad- 
vance had been made beyond the point which we had previously 
observed : the second of the dates is that of the shutting up of the 
theatres on the breaking out of the Civil War. For the whole of 
this period, we may take the history of Shakspeare's works as om- 
leading thread. Men of eminent genius lived around and after him : 
but there were none who do not derive much of their importance 
from the relation in which they stand to him ; and there were hardly 



256 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

any whose works do not owe much of their excellence to the in- 
fluence of his. 

Thus considered, the stages through which the Drama passed 
may be said to have been four, unequal in endurance and very 
unlike in character. Three of them may be regarded as having 
chiefly occurred during his life, the fourth as falling wholly after 
his death.* 

5. The first of these witnessed the early manhood of Shakspeare. 
The year already noted as its commencement was the twenty-first 
of his age : it comes to a close about 1593, being the earliest date 
which is universally admitted as belonging to any of his character- 
istic works. 

It should be observed, in the outset, that there were at this time 
court-dramas, to which alone persons of rank condescended to give 
attention. Of these the most fashionable were the comedies of 
John Lyly, productions not without value, but distinguished both 
by fantastic unreality in the plots, and by those strained afiectations 
of style which we have already noted in his " Euphues." The 
courtiers patronized also dull tragedies on the classical model; 
some of which were translated from the French, while the most 
famous of the original writers was the poet Daniel. 

The popular dramas were quite unlike these. They were com- 
posed by a knot of men, several of whom possessed genius so dis- 
tinguished, as to make us regret deeply that their lives should have 
been wasted in idle pamphlet-writing, and in the composition of 
plays framed on rough and faulty models. Yet these were the 
teachers, the immediate predecessors, and the earliest coadjutors 
of Shakspeare. The character of the class may be fairly under- 
stood, if three writers are taken as its representatives : the un- 
fortunate Christopher Marlowe; the equally unfortunate Robert 
Greene ; and the author of the Three Parts of Henry the Sixth, 
which are usually, and probably with good reason, inserted among 
Shakspeare's works. Peele's name, though valuable to the liter- 
ary antiquary, is less important than any of these. His chief 
merit lay in his improvement of dramatic verse. 
6.1562.) Marlowe's plays are stately Tragedies, serious and so- 
rf. 1593.J lemn in purpose, energetic and often extravagant in pas- 
sion, with occasional touches of deep pathos, and in language 
richly and even pompously imaginative. His ''Tragical History 
of Doctor Faustus" is one of the finest poems in our language. 
Greene's are loose Legendary Plays, of a form which is exemplified 
in Cymbeline. They are fanciful or fantastic rather than dramatic 
* Edinburgh Eeview, vol. Ixxi. : 1840. 



THE EARLY WORKS OF SHAKSPEARE. 257 

in design, romantic in sentiment, and not unlike the metrical 
romances in their complication, hurry, and confusion of incident. 
Of Henry the Sixth, it is enough to say that it is a kind of fore- 
taste, a rudimental outline, of Shakspeare's later Historical Plays ; 
and that it is obviously distinguished from them by wanting the 
comic elements, and, indeed, all that is purely imaginary. 

All these three kinds of dramas, the tragedies of Marlowe, the 
romantic pictures of Greene, and the chivalrous panoramas of the 
Historical Plays, were clearly the offspring of the inartificial old 
drama which had so long been native in England. Although some 
of the authors were scholars, learning furnished none of their 
models. But, if they inherited from the writers of the morals and 
miracle-plays their defiance of the unities, and their prevalent dis- 
regard for regularity of plan, they had suddenly attained, as if it 
had been by a happy instinct, a wonderfully just conception of the 
true function of the drama, as a representation of human life, in- 
tended to excite interest and awaken reflective pleasure. It is 
important likewise to remember, that they profited eagerly by Sur- 
rey's introduction of blank verse. They adopted it at once, im- 
proved it with extraordinary skill, and owed to it in great part 
the remarkable success which they reached in uniting imaginative 
richness with freedom and force of dramatic imitation. 
h. 1564. ) 6. If it is right to assign Henry the Sixth wholly to Shak- 
d. 1616. j speare, this fine group of dramas might by itself account well 
for his time, till his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year. But, throwing 
doubtful questions aside, we can positively assert his having composed, 
in this earliest period of his author-life, three other works, all 
Comedies and still extant. The first is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
which we probably possess in its original shape : another is the 
Comedy of Errors, which likewise does not seem to have ever been 
remodelled : and the third is Love's Labour Lost, which subsequently 
underwent many changes before it assumed the form in which it 
now survives. There are likewise two of the great Tragedies, which, 
although the edition in which we commonly read them was framed 
much later, were first written in this early period, in a form which, 
by fortunate accidents, is still in existence. The one is Hamlet, of 
which the older version is little more than a sketch : the other is 
Romeo and Juliet, which was altered much less. 

In the little we have thus learned about the other dramas of the 
time, there is enough to show that the mighty master, even in these 
his juvenile essays, had taken a wide step beyond them all. It 
is a fact especially to be remarked, that, in already attempting 
comedy, and in bringing it into a shape which he himself never 



258 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

much improved, he was doing that which was more difficult than 
anything else he could have aimed at. For of pure comedy it may 
safely be asserted, that it had no existence in England till he 
created it. 

It would be an employment at once interesting and conducive to 
improvement in criticism, to compare these early works with those 
of the poet's full maturity, in respect of the views of life which the 
two eras respectively exhibit. Here, it will be evident, everything 
is still juvenile and unripe : the world in its externals, and the 
heart and intellect and character of man, are alike known but 
vaguely and from the distance. The comic characters are by 
far the most distmctly conceived: the power of observation was 
already so far developed in the young poet's mind, that he could 
apply his knowledge to the act of invention felicitously and freely, 
when he did not need to do more than embellishing the actual with 
pleasant wit or grotesque humour. But his reflective faculty was 
not yet enough practised, his imagination not yet possessed deeply 
enough by the shapes which serious feeling afterwards prompted, 
to enable him to create elevated character, or to venture on a 
broad and bold cast of incident. The first of the comedies that 
have been named is a slight and careless tale of fickleness in love, 
among personages who have perhaps less of individuality than 
any others that the poet ever drew. The second is an ingenious 
comedy of intrigue, that is, a play dependent for its interest on 
the combination and gradual unravelling of perplexing incidents : 
and this is pretty nearly its greatest merit. The other rises higher 
into the world of poetry : but its whimsically original mimicry of 
chivahy and romance has an air of unreality and coldness ; and 
the poet is nowhere so much at his ease as in ridicuhng the little 
aifectations which his observation had shown him, in manners, in 
feeling, and in the fashion of language. 

Marvellously unlike is all this to the grand pictures of life, which 
he soon afterwards began to pamt : pictures which group all their 
characters, whether elevated or mean, in situations exciting uni- 
versal sympathies ; pictures whose tone of sentiment, whether serious 
or comic, is always coloured by the finest poetic light ; pictures 
which, from the deepest tragedy to the broadest farce, we cannot 
behold without being forced to meditate on some of the most 
important problems of human life and action. 

7. If Shakspeare was more than the scholar in that stage of his 
progress which we have now considered, he was indisputably the 
teacher and model ever after. We may set down a second period 
for him and for the drama, as extending, from the point at which we 



shakspeare's histories and comedies. 258 

last left him, to his thirty-sixth year, or till about 1600. This was, 
so far as existing works are the evidence, the most active part of 
his literary life : indeed the number of works which flowed from his 
pen during those seven or eight years, might strengthen the current 
notion of his carelessness in writing, if we did not know positively 
that, in some of his dramas at least, the pointedness and strength 
were reached by laborious correction. 

The most elevated works of those years were his magnificent 
series of Historical Plays, or, as they were called. Histories. Then 
were written all of them except Henry the Sixth and Henry the 
Eighth, a collection of six plays in all. Of Comedies the period 
produced, before 1598, four at least : The Taming of the Shrew, 
the Midsummer-Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and 
The Merchant of Venice. Also, either about that year or very 
soon after it, there appeared four other Comedies ; Much Ado about 
Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and the Merry Wives of 
Windsor. Towards the end of the time Romeo and Juliet was 
re- written. 

If the poet's career had closed at this point, his place would 
have been the highest in our literature, yet not so high as it is. 
Those works which have just been enumerated, as belonging to his 
middle stage, are distinguished, much more than the later ones, by 
variety in the views of life which they present to us. But the 
loftiest and most earnest views of all, those which open up the 
world of tragedy, were but dawning in his mind at the commence- 
ment of this period, when the early Hamlet had just been com- 
posed : they gradually became familiar to him in those bold com- 
binations which his historical pieces suggested : and, in the Romeo 
and Juliet, they exhibit themselves with a clearness and force which 
presaged a new era. The ruling temper of the poet's mind was the 
cheerful and hopeful one, which gives birth to genuine comedy, and 
which, in that mind, as in none other, had its images coloured by 
the gorgeous hues of poetic fancy. Never, either before or after- 
wards, did he cherish that purely comic train of thought and inven- 
tion, at once real and dramatic, poetical and passionate, which 
flowed and ebbed through his mind like a mighty sea during the 
last few years of the sixteenth century. The variety of characters 
and scenes which then rose up before him, is altogether marvellous. 
The extremes are instanced in the fairy loveliness of the Mid- 
summer-Night's Dream ; the woodland romance of As You Like It ; 
the harmonious blending of fanciful gaiety, sympathetic sorrow, 
and satirical mirth, which runs through Much Ado about Nothing ; 
and the yet bolder union of dissimilar materials, which, in The 



260 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

Merchant of Venice, raises us almost to the height of tragic 
terror. 

8. Shakspeare's last days were his greatest. His skill as an 
artist was perfected : his poetic imagination was full to overflowing : 
his power of conceiving and representing passion was, if less in- 
tense, at least under more thorough control. Yet it is not chimeri- 
cal to think, that there is spread over most of the works of those 
last fifteen years a tone of sadness which had not been perceived 
before. 

The series after 1600 began with the remaining four of the five 
great Tragedies: Othello, the sternest and gloomiest of all his 
dramas, coming first ; the re-composed Hamlet following, and being 
succeeded by Lear; and Macbeth appearing before 1610. To the 
same decade belong Henry the Eighth ; the three Roman tragedies of 
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra ; and those 
two singular pieces, Timon of Athens, and Troilus and Cressida, 
which almost strike us as parodies both on the drama and on 
human life. A similar jarring of feeling in the poet's mind is trace- 
able in Measure for Measure, which in all likelihood is nearly of the 
same date. But his genius next assumed a new temper, proba- 
bly after he had retired from the turmoil of his harassing profes- 
sion to the repose of his early home in the country. Amidst the 
soothing influences of nature and solitude, anxiety and despon- 
dence gave place to a tone of placidly thoughtful imagination, 
worthy to close the days of the greatest among poets. In Cjnnbe- 
line and the Winter's Tale, he fell back on that legendary kind of 
adventures, which had occupied the stage so frequently in his 
youth : and in The Tempest, which we have good reason to^ sup- 
pose his last work, he peopled his haunted island with a group 
of beings, whose conception indicates a greater variety of imagina- 
tion, and in some points a greater depth of philosophic thought, 
than any other characters or events which he has bequeathed 
to us. 

9. " The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature : it 
is the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near hun in 
the creative powers of the mind : no man had ever such strength at 
once, and such variety of imagination. The number of characters 
m his plays is astonishingly great ; yet he never takes an abstract 
quality to embody it, scarcely perhaps a definite condition of 
manners, as Jonson does. Nor did he draw much from living 
models : there is no manifest appearance of personal caricature in 
his comedies ; though in some slight traits of character this may 
not improbably have been the case. Compare with him Homer, 



THE GENIUS OF SHAKSPEARE. 261 

the tragedians of Greece, the poets of Italy, Plautus, Cervantes, 
Moliere, Addison, Le Sage, Fielding, Richardson. Scott, the ro- 
mancers of the elder or later schools : one man has far more than 
surpassed them all. Others may have been as subhme; others 
may have been more pathetic ; others may have equalled him in 
gi'ace and purity of language, and have shunned some of his faults : 
but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out of the 
human heart, -whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the 
dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It 
is, if not entirely wanting, yet very little manifested in comparison 
with him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent 
period. 

'' These dramatists are hardly less inferior to Shakspeare in 
judgment. To this quality I particularly advert ; because foreign 
writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed an extraordinary 
barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong indeed to an 
age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its entertainments, and are 
of course to be classed with what is caUed the romantic school, 
which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach. But no one who 
has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare, or contem- 
porary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing of 
the theatres in the civil war, ■will pretend to deny that there is far 
less in-egularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be 
desu-ed, in a large proportion of these, (perhaps in aU the tragedies,) 
than in his own. We need only repeat the names of The Merchant 
of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, The Merry Wives 
of Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excel- 
lently constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But, even 
where an analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is gene- 
rally an unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter's 
Tale is not a model to foUow ; but we feel that the Winter's Tale is a 
single story : it is even managed as such with consummate skill."* 

THE MINOR DRAMATIC POETS. 

10. When we look away from Shakspeare to his dramatic con- 
temporaries, we find it needless to revert farther than the com- 
mencement of the second stage in his history. The fact that was 
characteristic of the earlier part of the period which then began, 
was the predominating influence exercised by him, not over those 
dramatists only who were avowedly his pupils and imitators, but 
also over those who probably beheved that they were quite inde- 

* Hallam : Introduction to the Literature of Europe. 



262 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

pendent of him. The effects of this influence are not traceable 
merely in style, in the repetition of scattered reflections and images, 
or in the imitation, designed or undesigned, of characters and inci- 
dents. They show themselves still more in community of senti- 
ment, in general resemblance of plan, and in those finer points of 
analogy which are more readily felt than described. 

It would have been well if there had been as decided a likeness 
in the moral aspect. Although it cannot seriously be maintained 
of Shakspeare, that he keeps always before him the highest sanc- 
tions of conduct, it is yet true that, if his works were weeded of a 
very few obnoxious passages, they might be pronounced free from 
all gross moral taint : while it is likewise the fact, that hardly any 
imaginative writings, not avowedly religious in structure, are so 
strongly suggestive as many of his are, of solemn and instructive 
meditation. In regard to almost all the other dramatists of the time 
it must be said, that, if they do teach goodness, they teach it in their 
own despite : and of the men of eminent genius, Ben Jonson alone 
deserves the praise of having had a steady respect for moral dis- 
tinctions ; while even with him there is an occasional coarseness not 
reconcilable with his general practice. The licentiousness began 
in the earlier years of the seventeenth centmy ; and it increased 
with accelerated speed, till dramatic composition came to an en- 
forced pause. Writings having such a character must, in a course 
of study like ours, be passed over very cursorily. The pleasure 
which their genius gives can be safely enjoyed only by minds 
mature and well trained; unless in such purified specimens, as 
those which have been placed at the disposal of youthful readers 
by a man of letters in our own time.* 

11. Highest by far in poetical and dramatic value stand the works 
K 1576. "I bearing the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. A great 
I. 158a { i^^'iiy of these are said to have been written by the two 
d. 1615. 1 poets jointly, a few by the former alone, and a larger num- 
ber by the latter after he had lost his friend. Beaumont, the 
younger of the two, died before he was thirty years old. Alliances 
of this kind have taken place in no kind of poetry but the drama- 
tic : there they have been common : they were especially so in 
England at the time now in question, and were often prompted 
merely by the necessities of the wi-iters. The association of those 
two poets seems to have been the effect of friendship : but it was soon 

1 Charles Lamb's " Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets." Lamb 
gives no quotations from Shakspeare 's dramas. Nor are any inserted here : 
the noblest passages may be read in very many books : and inferior ones 
would do injustice to the great poet. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 263 

dissolved ; and it is not easy to mark any decisive change of literary 
character in the works which were certainly Fletcher's, and written 
after he had been left alone. It is too certain, however, that the 
looseness of fancy which deformed aU those dramas from the begin- 
ning, degenerated afterwards into confirmed and deliberate licen- 
tiousness : and it is a circumstance not to be overlooked, that the 
moral badness which was common to aU works of the kind then 
written, is nowhere so glaring as in these, which were the most 
finely and delicately imaginative dramas of their day, and are 
poetically superior to everythmg of the sort in our language except 
the works of Shakspeare. There may be quoted from them many 
short passages, and some entire scenes, as delightful as anything in 
the range of poetry; sometimes pleasing by their rich imagery, 
sometimes by their profound pathos, and not infrequently by then- 
elevation and purity of thought and feeling. But there are 
very few of the plays whose stories could be wholly told without 
offence ; and there is none that should be read entirely by a young 
person.* 

* FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER. 
TJie PHnce's description of Ms Page BellaiHo, in the play of " Philaster." 
Hunting the buck, 
I found him sitting by a fountain's side, 
Of which he borrowed some to quench his thirst, 
And paid the nymph as much again in tears. 
A garland laid him bj, made by himself, 
Of many several flowers bred in the bay, 
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness 
Delighted me : but, ever when he turned 
His tender eyes upon them, he would weep, 
As if he meant to make 'em grow again. 
Seeing such pretty helpless innocence 
Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story. 
He told me that his parents gentle died, 
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields, 
Which gave him roots ; and of the crystal springs, 
Which did not stop their courses ; and the sun. 
Which still, he thanked him, yielded him his light. 
Then took he up his garland, and did show 
What every flower, as country people hold, 
Did signify ; and how all, ordered thus. 
Express 'd his grief; and, to my thoughts, did read 
The prettiest lecture of his coimtry art 
That could be wished : so that methought I could 
Have studied it. I gladly entertained him, 
Who was as glad to follow ; and have got 
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy 
That ever master kept. 



264 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMA. 

12. In Beaumont and Fletcher's works, those irregularities of 
plan, which are often made a reproach to the English drama, reach 
their utmost height. On the other hand, the regular classical 
model was approached, as closely as English tastes and habits would 
6.1574.) 3^110 w, m not a few of the \sTitings, both tragic and comic, 
d. 1637. 1 of Ben Jonson. This celebrated man deserves immortal- 
ity for other reasons, besides his comparative purity of moral senti- 
ment. He was the one man of his time, besides Shakspeare, who 
deserves to be caUed a reflective artist ; the one man of his time, 
besides Shakspeare, who perceived principles of art and worked in 
obedicDce to them. His tragedies are stately, eloquent, and poeti- 
cal : his comedies are more faithful poetic portraits of contemporary 
English life than those of any other dramatist of his age, the one 
great poet being excepted. His vigour in the conception of char- 
acter has been generally allowed, and perhaps overvalued. Less 
justice has been rendered to the union of poetical vigour and deli- 
cacy, which pervades ahnost every thing that he ^Tote. He is 
poetical, though not richly imaginative, not in his pastoral of The 
Sad Shepherd only, or in his masques, or in his beautiful lyrics. 
His poetry is perceptible even among the comic scenes of Every 
Man in His Humour, or through the half-heroic perplexities of the 
Alchymist and the Fox.* 

* BEN JONSON. 

From the Comedy of " The New Inn.''^ 
Did you ever know or hear of the Lord Beaufort, 
"Who serv'd so bravely in France ? I was his page, 
And, ere he died, his friend. I follow 'd him 
First in the wars ; and in the times of peace 
I waited on his studies ; which were right. 
He had no Arthurs, nor no Rosicleers, 
No Knights of the Sun, nor Amadis de Gauls, 
Primalions and Pantagruels, public nothings, 
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister. 
Sent out to poison courts and infest manners : 
But great Achilles', Agamemnon's acts, 
Sage Nestor's counsels and Ulysses' sleights, 
Tydides' fortitude, as Homer wrought them 
In his immortal fancy, for examples 
Of the heroic virtue : — or as Virgil, 
That Master of the Epic Poem, limn'd 
Pious jEneas, his religious prince, 
Bearing his aged parent on his shoulders, 
Rapt from the flames of Troy, with his young son. 
And these he brought to practice and to use. 

He gave me first my breeding, I acknowledge ; 
Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours, 



JONSON AND MINOR DRAMATISTS. 265 

13. Jonson might be held to have written chiefly for men of sense 
and knowledge, Fletcher and his friend for men of fashion and the 
world. A similar audience to that of Jonson may have been aimed 
at in the stately, epical tragedies of Chapman. The other class of 
auditors, or one a step lower, would have relished better such plays 
as those of Middleton and Webster : the former of whom is chiefly 
remarkable for a few striking ideas imperfectly wrought out ; while 
the latter, in several of his tragic dramas, is singularly successful in 
depicting events of deep horror. 

Along with these men wi-ote others who, clinging to the older 
forms and ideas, may be regarded as having been in the main the 
dramatists of the commonalty. The chief of these was Thomas 
Heywood, an author of extraordinary industry, who boasted of 
having in his long life had a share in more than two hundred plays. 
In some of his best works there is a natural and quiet sweetness, 
which makes him not undeserving of the title a critic has given 
him, " the prose Shakspeare ; " and he is one of the most moral 
playwriters of his time. To the same class belonged Dekker, also 
a voluminous pamphleteer, and known as having co-operated in 
several plays which appear among the works of more celebrated 
men, especially Massinger. 

14. The name which has last been read, introduces us to that 
which may be treated as the closing age of the Old English Drama. 
As its representatives may be taken Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. 
1. 1584. "I Massinger is by some critics ranked next after Shakspeare. 
d. 1640. J Assm-edly, his skill in the representation of character is 
superior to that of any of the secondary di-amatists except Jonson, 
and his poetical beauty not much less than Fletcher's ; while, 
fm'ther, he has a quaint grace of language not known to either. 
Of piu-e comedy he gives us hardly anything ; and for pure tragedy 
he wants depth of pathos. But his vigour of portraiture, the 
chivalrous turn of his stories, the inventive novelty which distin- 
guishes many of his situations and incidents, and the melancholy 
dignity of his imagery and sentiment, make his finest pieces in- 
teresting in the extreme. 

That open-handed sit upon the clouds, 

And press the liberality of heaven 

Down to the laps of thankful men ! But then, 

The trust committed to me at his death 

Was above all ; and left so strong a tie 

On all my powers, as time shall not dissolve, 

Till it dissolve itself, and bury all : 

The care of his brave heir and only son. 



266 THE OLD ENGLISH DKAMA. 

his New Way to Pay Old Debts, for the sake of its sketch from 
life in Sir Griles Overreach : and his Fatal Dowry also has been 
preserved, in Rowe's plagiarism from it in The Fau' Penitent. But 
these are hardly his best works : others, at any rate, exhibit his 
characteristic peculiarities more strikingly. Such are The Unna- 
tural Combat, an extravagant tragedy, in which a son avenges by 
parricide the murder of his mother ; and The Duke of Milan, full 
of variety, and ending in a catastrophe of wildly conceived horror. 
Such also are The Bondman, spirited and rough; The Picture, 
fanciful and romantic; and The City Madam, remarkable for the 
richness of the poetry with which it invests contemporary life, and 
still more for the energy with which, in the person of Luke, the 
dramatist depicts the changes caused by cu'cumstances in a char- 
acter uniting meanness with ambition.* 

It is instructive to note how the low moral tone, if not of the 

* PHILIP MASSINGER. 

From the Tragedy of^'- The Fatal Doxoryy 

The Marshal of Burgundy haxnMg died while imprisoned for debt, his son 
Charalois surrenders himself to redeem the dead body. He speaTcs from the 
prison-dooi\ as th&fwiieraljgasses., attended by a few soldiers of the deceased as 
■mourners. 

How like a silent stream shaded with night, 

And gliding softly with our windy sighs, 

Moves the whole frame of this solemnity; 

Tears, sighs, and blacks, filling the simile ! 

Whilst I, the only murmur in this grove 

Of death, thus hollowly break forth ! Vouchsafe 

To stay awhile. Eest, rest in peace, dear earth ! 

Thou that brought'st rest to their unthankful lives. 

Whose cruelty denied thee rest in death ! 

Here stands thy poor executor, thy son, 

That makes his life prisoner to bail thy death ; 

Who gladlier puts on this captivity, 

Than virgins long in love their wedding-weeds. 
Of all that ever thou hast done good to. 

These only have good memories ; for they 

Eemember best, forget not gratitude. 

I thank you for this last and friendly love! 

And, though this country, like a viperous mother, 

Not only hath eat up ungratefully 

All means of thee, her son, but last thyself, 

Leaving thy heir so bare and indigent, 

He cannot raise thee a poor monument, 

Such as a flatterer or an usurer hath ; 

Thy worth in every honest breast builds one, 

Making their friendly hearts thy funeral stone ! 



FORD AND SHIRLEY. 287 

nation, yet at least of those for whom plays were written, is indi- 
cated by all these works. With Massinger the most heroic senti- 
ments, rising sometimes, as in his Virgia Martyr, into rehgious 
rapture, prevail thi*ough whole scenes, along with which come 
others of the grossest ribaldry. By Ford, on the other hand, inci- 
dents of the most reyolting kind are laid down as the fomidation of 
liis plots : and in the representation of these he wastes a pathos and 
tenderness, which, though lyrical rather than dramatic, are yet 
deeper than anything elsewhere to be found in our drama.* 

* JOHN FORD. 

From the Play of " The Lover''s Melancholy.'''' 

Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales 
Which, poets of an elder time have feign 'd 
To glorify their Tempe, bred in me 
Desire of visiting that paradise. 
To Thessaly I came ; and, living private, 
Without acquaintance of more sweet companions 
Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts, 
I day by day frequented silent groves. 
And solitary walks. One morning early 
This accident encountered me. I heard 
The sweetest and most ravishing contention 
That art and nature ever were at strife in. 

A sound of music touch 'd mine ears, or rather 
Indeed entranc'd my soul. As I stole nearer, 
Invited by the melody, I saw 
This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute, 
With strains of strange variety and harmony, 
Proclaiming (as it seem'd) so bold a challenge 
To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds, 
That, as they flock'd about him, all stood silent, 
Wond'ring at what they heard. I wonder'd too. 

A nightmgale, 
Nature's best-skill'd musician, undertakes 
The challenge ; and, for every several strain 
The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own. 
He could not rim division with more art 
Upon his quaking instrument, than she. 
The nightingale, did with her various notes 
Eeply to. 

Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last 
Into a pretty anger ; that a bird, 
Whom art had never taught cleflfe, moods, or notes, 
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study 
Had busied many hours to perfect practice : 
To end the controversy, in a rapture, 
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly, 
So many voluntaries, and so quick, 



268 THE OLD ENGLISH DKAMA. 

When we open the pages of Shirley, again, a man of very fine 
poetic fancy, with an excellent turn for the light comedy of man- 
ners, we are tempted to suppose that we must, by mistake, have 
stumbled on some of the foulest births that appeared in the reign 
of Charles the Second. Vice is no longer held up as a mere pic- 
ture : it is indicated, and sometimes directly recommended, as a fit 
example. T\Tien the drama was at length suppressed, the act de- 
stroyed a moral nuisance. 

That there was curiosity and cunning, 

Concord in discord, lines of diff 'ring method 

Meeting in one full centre of delight. 

The bird, (ordain'd to be 

Music's first martyr,) strove to imitate 

These several sounds ; which when her warbling throat 

Fail'd in, for grief down dropt she on the lute 

And brake her heart ! It was the quaintest sadness 

To see the conqueror upon her hearse 

To weep a funeral elegy of tears. 



THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 269 



CHAPTEE VII. 

THE AGE OF SPENSEE, SHAKSPEAEE, BACON, AND MILTON. 
A. D. 1558— A. D. 1660. 

SECTION FIFTH : THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY. 

Spensee's PoETEY. 1. His Grenius— His Minor Poems. — 2. Spenser's Faerie 
Queene— Its Design.— 3. Allegories of the Faerie Queene— Its Poetical 
Character. — 4. The Stories of the Six Books of the Faerie Queene. — Minoe 
Poets. 5. The Great Variety in the Kinds of Poetry — Classification of 
them. — 6. Metrical Translations — Marlowe — Chapman— Fairfax — Sandys. 
— 7. Historical Narrative Poems — Shakspeare — Daniel — Drayton — Giles 
and Phineas Fletcher. — 8. Pastorals — Pastoral Dramas of Fletcher and 
Jonson — Warner — Drayton— "Wither — Browne. — 9. Descriptive Poems — 
Drayton's Poly-Olbion — Didactic Poems — Lord Brooke and Davies — Her- 
bert and Quarles— Poetical Satires — Hall — Marston — Donne. — 10. Earlier 
Lyrical Poems— Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Jonson — Ballads — Sonnets of 
Drmnmond and Daniel. — 11. Lyrical Poems of the Metaphysical School — 
Donne and Cowley— Lyrics and other Poems of a Modern Cast — Denham 
and Waller. — Milton's Poetey. 12. His Life and Works. — 13. His Minor 
Poems — L'Allegro and II Penseroso — Comus — Lycidas— Ode on the Nativ- 
ity — Later Poems— Paradise Eegained and Samson Agonistes. — 14. The 
Paradise Lost. 

THE POETRY OF EDMUND SPENSER. 

h 1553. ) 1. In our study of the Non-Dramatic Poetry of this period, 
d. 1599. j i\^Q £j.gt name we require to learn is that of Spenser, a 
word of happy omen, one of the most illustrious names in the liter- 
ary annals of Europe ; the name of 

That gentle Bard, 



Chosen hy the Muses for their Page of State ; 
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven 
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace. 

Among English poets he stands lower only than Shakspeare, and 
Chaucer, and Milton : and, if we extend the parallel to the continent, 
his masterpiece is not unworthy of companionship with its Italian 



270 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

model, the chivalrous epic of Ariosto. But no comparison is needed 
for endearing, to the pure in heart, works which unite, as few such 
unite, rare genius with moral purity ; or for recommending, to the 
lovers of poetry, poems which exhibit at once exquisite sweetness 
and felicity of language, a luxuriant beauty of imagination which has 
hardly ever been surpassed, and a tenderness of feehng never else- 
where conjoined with an imagiaation so vivid. 

Spenser's earliest works broke in on what may be considered, in 
the history of our poetry, as a pause in the march of improvement. 
Since the middle of the century, no more decisive advance had taken 
place than that which is shown by the homely satire and personal 
narrative of Gascoigne. In his " Shepherd's Calendar," Spenser, 
while he exhibited some fruits of his foreign studies, purposely 
adopted, as a means of gaining truth to nature, a rusticity both 
of sentiment and of style, which, though ardently admired at the 
time, does not. now seem to have presaged the ideality of his later 
works. His Italian tastes were further proved by an elaborate 
series of sonnets ; and several other poems of greater extent may, 
with these, be summarily passed over. 

2. We must make ourselves acquainted more closely with his 
greatest work, a Narrative Poem, which, though it contains many 
thousand lines, is nevertheless incomplete, no more than half of the 
original design being executed. It is asserted, on doubtful author- 
ity, that the latter half was written, but perished by shipwreck. 
The diction is not exactly that of the poet's time, being, by an un- 
fortunate error of judgment, studded purposely with phrases and 
forms that had already become antiquated ; and odd expressions are 
also forced sometimes on the author by the difficulties of the mea- 
sure he adopted, that fine but complex stanza of nine lines which 
all of us know in Childe Harold. 

His magnificent poem is caUed " The Faerie Queene." The title 
does in some degree signify the contents ; but the notion which it 
tends to convey is considerably dififerent from the reality. The 
Fairy Land of Spenser is not the region which we are accustomed 
to understand by that term. It is indeed a realm of marvels ; and 
there are elves and other supernatural beings among its inhabitants : 
but these are only its ornaments. It is rather the Land of Chi- 
valry, a country not laid down on any map : a scene in which heroic 
daring and ideal purity are the objects chiefly presented for our 
admiration; and in which the principal personages are knights 
achieving perilous adventures, and ladies rescued from frightful 
miseries, and enchanters, good and evil, whose spells afiect the 
destiny of those human persons. 



Spenser's faerie queene. 271 

The imaginary world of the poem, and the doings and sufferings 
of its denizens, are, in a word, those of the chivalrous romances : 
and the idea of working up such subjects into poems worthy of a 
cultivated audience, had already been put in act in the romantic 
epics of Italy. Our great poet would not, probably, have written 
exactly as he did write, if Ariosto had not written before him ; nor 
is it unlikely that he was guided also to some extent by the more 
recent example of Tasso. But his design was, in several striking 
features, nobler and more arduous than that of either. His deep 
seriousness is thoroughly unlike the mocking tone of the Orlando 
Furioso ; he rose still higher than the Jerusalem Delivered in his 
earnest moral enthusiasm ; and he aimed at something much beyond 
either of his masters, but unfortunately at something which marred 
the poetic effect of his work, when he framed it so that it should 
be really a series of ethical allegories. 

3. The leading story, doubtless, is based, not on allegory, but on 
traditional history. Its hero is the chivalrous Arthur of the British 
legends. But even he was to be wrapt up in a cloud of symbols : 
Gloriana, the Queen of Faerie, who gave name to the poem, and 
who was to be the object of the prince's reverent love, was herself 
an emblem of virtuous renown ; while, to confuse us yet more, she 
was also respectfully designed to represent in some way or other 
the poet's sovereign, EHzabeth. If this part of the plan was to be 
elaborated much in the latter half of the poem, we may regret the 
less that we have missed it. 

In the parts which we have, Arthur emerges only at rare inter- 
vals, to take a decisive but passing share in some of the events in 
which the secondary personages are involved. It is in the narra- 
tion of those events that the poem is chiefly occupied ; and in them 
allegory reigns supreme. All the incidents are significant of moral 
truths ; of the moral dangers which beset the path of man, of the 
virtues which it is the duty of man to cherish. The personages, 
too, are allegories, quite as strictly as those of Bunyan's pilgrim 
story. Indeed the anxiety with which the double meaning is kept 
up, is the circumstance that chiefly removes the poem from ordi- 
nary sympathies. Yet, regarded merely as stories, the adventures 
possess an interest, which is almost everywhere lively and some- 
times becomes intense. We often forget the hidden meaning, in 
the delight with which we contemplate the pictures by which it is 
veiled. Solitary forests spread out their glades around us; en- 
chanted palaces and fairy gardens gleam suddenly on the eye ; the 
pomp of tournaments glitters on vast plains ; touching and sublime 
sentiments, couched in language marvellously sweet, are now pre- 



272 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

sented as the attributes of the human personages of the tale, and 
now wrapt up in the disguise of gorgeous pageants. 

4. The adventures of the characters, connected by no tie except 
the occasional interposition of Arthur, form really six independent 
Poetic Tales. These are related in our six extant Books, each 
containing twelve Cantos. 

The First Book, by far the finest of all, both in idea and in exe- 
cution, relates the Legend of the Red-Cross Knight, who is the type 
of Holiness. He is the appointed champion of the persecuted Lady 
Una, the representative of Truth, the daughter of a king whose 
realm, described in shadowy phrases, receives in one passage the 
name of Eden. In her service he penetrates into the labyrinth of 
Error, and slays the monster that inhabited it. But, under the 
temptations of the enchanter Archimago, who is the emblem of 
Hypocrisy, he is enticed away by the beautiful witch Duessa, or 
Falsehood, on whom the wizard has bestowed the figure of her pure 
rival. This separation plunges the betrayed Knight into severe 
sufiering; and it exposes the unprotected lady to many dangers, 
in the description of which occurs some of the most exquisite poetry 
of the work. At length, in the House of Holiness, the Kjiight is 
taught Repentance. Purified and strengthened, he vanquishes the 
Dragon which was Una's enemy, and is betrothed to her in her 
father's kingdom. 

In the Second Book we have the Legend of Sir G-uyon, illustrat- 
ing the virtue of Temperance, that is, of resistance to all allurements 
sensual and worldly. This part of the poem abounds, beyond all 
the rest, in exquisite painting of picturesque landscapes ; in some of 
which, however, imitation of Tasso is obvious. The Legend of 
Britomart, or of Chastity, is the theme of the Third Book, in which, 
besides the heroine, are introduced Belphcebe and Amoret, two of 
the most beautiful of those female characters whom the poet takes 
such pleasure in delineating. Next comes the Legend of Friend- 
ship, personified in the knights Cambel and Triamond. In it is the 
tale of Florimel, a version of an old tale of the romances, embel- 
lished with an array of fine imagery, which is dwelt on with admir- 
ing delight in one of the noblest odes of Collins. Yet this Fourth 
Book, and the two which follow, are generally allowed to be on the 
whole inferior to the first three. The falling off is most perceptible 
when we pass to the Fifth Book, containing the Legend of Sir 
Artegal, who is the emblem of Justice. This story indeed is told, 
not only with a strength of moral sentiment unsurpassed elsewhere 
by the poet, but also with some of his most striking exhibitions of 
personification : the interest, however, is weakened by the constant 



Spenser's faerie queene. 273 

anxiety to bring out that subordinate signification, in which the 
narrative was intended to celebrate the government of Spenser's 
patron Lord Grey in Ireland. The Sixth Book, the Legend of 
Sir Calidore, or of Courtesy, is apt to dissatify us through its want 
of unity ; although some of the scenes and figures are inspired with 
the poet's warmest glow of fancy.* 

* EDMUND SPENSER. 
From " The Faerie Queene J''' 

I. UNA DESERTED BY THE EED-CKOSS KNIGHT. 

Yet she, most faithful Lady, all this while 

Forsaken, — woeful, solitary maid, 
Far from all people's press, as in exile. 

In wilderness and wasteful deserts strayed, 

To seek her Knight, who, — suhtilely hetrayed 
Through that late vision which the Enchanter wrought, 

Had her abandoned : — She, of nought afraid. 
Through woods and wasteness wide him daily sought : 
Yet wished tidings none of him unto her brought. 

One day, nigh weary of the irksome way. 

From her unhasty beast she did alight ; 
And on the grass her dainty limbs did lay. 

In secret shadow, far from all men's sight : 

From her fair head her fillet she undight. 
And laid her stole aside : — her Angel's face, 

As the great eye of heaven shined bright. 

And made a sunshine in the shady place : 
Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace ! 

It fortun'e'd, out of the thickest wood, 

A ramping lion rushed suddenly. 
Hunting full greedy after savage blood :— 

Soon as the Royal Virgin he did spy, 

With gaping mouth at her ran greedily. 
To have at once devoured her tender corse : 

But, to the prey whenas he drew more nigh. 
His bloody rage assuaged with remorse. 
And, with the sight amazed, forgot his furious force. 

Instead thereof, he kissed her weary feet. 

And lick'd her lily hands, with fawning tongue. 

As he her wronged innocence did weet : 

Oh, how can Beauty master the most strong. 
And simple Truth subdue Avenging Wrong ! 

Whose yielded pride and proud submission. 

Still dreading death when she had marked long, 

Her heart gan melt in great compassion, 
And drizzling tears did shed for pure affection. 

m2 



274 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 



THE MINOR POETS OF THE TIME. 

5. Our file of Non-Dramatic poets from this age, beginning with 
the name of Spenser, will end with that of Milton. Between these 
two men, there were none whose genius can fahly be held equal to 
that of the minor play- writers. The drama would, though Shak- 
speare's works were withdrawn, be the kind of poetry, for the sake 
of which the time of Elizabeth and her next successors is most 
worthy of admiration. 

Yet the non-dramatic poetry of those two or three generations 
not only was abundant, but contains many specimens possessing 
very great excellence. Indeed the merit of the drama is a guar- 
antee for merit here. For the same poets generally laboured in 
both fields ; and the truth is, that the prevailing fashion, which 
drew away the most imaginative men to write for the stage, pro- 
duced not a few indifferent dramas, whose authors might have been 
eminent in other walks if they had confined themselves to them. 

In endeavouring to form a general notion of the large mass 
of literary works here lying before us, we find ourselves to be 
embarrassed by the remarkable variety of forms which poetry took, 
and in many of which also the same poet exerted himself by turns. 
Thus Shakspeare and Jonson, best known as dramatists, were 
successful writers of lyrical and other poems ; Drayton and Daniel, 
remembered now, if at aU, for their non-dramatic poems, possessed in 

U. ANGELS WATCHnfG OVER MANKIND. 

And is there care in heaven, and is there love 

In heavenly spirits to these creatures hase. 
That may compassion of their evils move ? 

There is : — else much more -OTetched were the case 

Of men than beasts : But, oh ! the exceeding grace 
Of Highest Grod, that loves his creatures so. 

And all his works with mercy doth embrace ; 
That blessed angels he sends to and fro, 
To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe ! 

How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 

To come to succour us that succour want ! 
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave 

The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant, 

Against foul fiends to aid us militant ! 
They for us fight : they watch and duly ward, 

And their bright squadrons round about us plant ; 
And all for love, and nothing for reward : 
Oh, why should heavenly God to men have such regard 



THE KINDS OF POETRY. 275 

their own day no small note as play- writers. Drayton, again, if we 
look beyond his plays, wrote poems belonging to almost every one 
of the kinds which will immediately be enmnerated. 

We require to classify, but cannot easily find a principle. One 
which is somewhat famous must be discarded at once, but, being 
instructive, should be described. It is that according to which 
Samuel Johnson classed together, under the title of Metaphysical, 
a large number of the poets of James's reign and the following gen- 
eration, beginning the list with Donne, and closing it with Cowley. 
" These were such as laboured after conceits, or novel tm-ns of 
thought, usually false, and restmg upon some equivocation of lan- 
guage or exceedingly remote analogy." This is just a descrip- 
tion of that corrupt taste towards which our English poets leant 
thi'oughout the first half of the seventeenth centm-y, and which had 
had its beginning even earlier ; a taste, like-^vise, which infected 
prose hterature deeply, and which we have seen hurtmg especially 
the eloquence of the pulpit. It would be impossible to name any 
poet of the tune, in whose writings s^nnptoms of it could not be 
traced. The only distinction we could draw is, between those who 
gave way to it only occasionally, (like Shakspeare, whose besetting 
sin it was,) and those who indulged in it pm-posely and incessantly, 
holding its manifestations indeed to be then- finest strokes of art. 
The disease had doubtless travelled from Italy : but .it was natural- 
ized as early as Lyly, assuming only some peculiarities which suited 
it for diffusion in its new climate. 

6. All the poetical works of that age, whose authors demand our 
acquaintance, may be distributed into Seven Classes, which, though 
the distinctions between them are not quite exact, may easily be 
kept apart from each other. They are these : the Metrical Trans- 
lations ; those Nan-ative Poems whose themes may be described as 
Historical ; the Descriptive Poems ; the Pastorals ; the Satu'es ; the 
Didactic Poems ; and the Lyrics. 

The earliest of the Translations, worthless as poems, exerted per- 
haps greater influence than the more meritorious works which fol- 
lowed. They were the means of kuidling, more widely than it 
would otherwise have spread, that mixed spirit of classicism and 
chivahy which breathes through so much of the Elizabethan poetry. 
This doubtful praise was earned, in the early part of the queen's 
reign, by several attempts which were alluded to when we began 
to study the literature of this great period. Translations from the 
Italian, both m prose and verse, showed themselves as early, and 
furnished stories to Shakspeare ; and others from the French were 
vet more common. 



276 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

We do not discover in those efforts any thing deserving to be 
called poetry, till we reach the translations of Marlowe from Ovid, 
Lucan, and the pseudo-Musseus. An undertaking still bolder was 
that of the dramatist Chapman, who, beginning in 1596, published 
at length an entire translation of the Iliad into English Alexan- 
drines. This work, spirited and poetical, but rough and incorrect, 
was not ill described by Pope when he said, that it was such an 
Iliad as Homer might have written before he came to years of dis- 
cretion. The Odyssey followed, from the same pen. Among the 
translations from the great poets of Italy, Harrington's Orlando 
Furioso deserves notice only as having just followed the Faerie 
Queene. Fairfax's Tasso, published in 1600, has been called by a 
modern poet one of the glories of Elizabeth's reign. It is equally 
poetical, accurate, and good ici style : and no modern work can 
contest with it the honour of being still our best version of the 
Jerusalem Delivered. Sandys' Metamorphoses of Ovid, and his 
Metrical Translations from Scripture, are poetically pleasing : and 
they have a merit in diction and versification which has been 
acknowledged thankfully by later poets. 

7. Poems of that second kind, which our list has called Historical 
Narratives, were the most ambitious of the original compositions. 
But, though aU that are worth remembering came after Spenser, 
none of them attempted to re-create his world of allegoric and 
chivalrous wonders. Nor was this by any means the most success- 
ful walk of the art. 

The favourite topics, besides a few religious ones, were Classical 
stories, which were treated frequently, or passages from English 
history, which were stUl more common, and were often dealt with 
in avowed imitation or continuation of the old Mu-ror of Magis- 
trates. In the former class, the most striking are two youthful 
poems of Shakspeare, the Lucrece, and the Venus and Adonis ; 
pieces morally equivocal in tone, but characteristically beautiful 
in sentiment and imagery. Of the extracts from the national 
history, there are not a few which were very celebrated. Daniel's 
series of poems from the Wars of the Roses, is soft and pleasing 
in details, but verbose and languid. Drayton's " Barons' Wars," 
and " England's Heroical Epistles," are much more interesting, 
and in many passages both touching and imaginative ; but in 
neither of them is there shown a just conception of the poet's 
prerogative of idealizing the actual. The good taste of our own 
time has rescued from forgetfnlness two interesting poems of this 
class : Chamberlayne's " Pharonnida ;" and the " Thealma and 
Clearchus," which Walton published as the work of an unknown 



THE BROTHERS FLETCHER. 277 

poet named Chalkhill. Several others must be left quite unno- 
ticed : and this series may be closed with the vigorous fragment of 
" Gondibert," by the dramatist Sir William Davenant. 

But different from all these were the religious poems composed by 
the two brothers Fletcher, cousins of the dramatic writer. " The 
Purple Island" of the younger brother, Phineas, is the nearest thing 
we have to an imitation of Spenser ; but it is hardly worthy of its 
fame. It is an undisguised and wearisome allegory, symbolizing all 
parts and functions both of man's body and of his mind ; and it is 
redeemed only by the poetical spirit of some of the passages. 
z>.ab.i580.l Griles Fletcher, however, has given us one of the most 
d. 1623. j beautiful religious poems in any language, animated in nar- 
rative, lively in fancy, and touching in feeling. Over-abundant it is, 
doubtless, in allegory ; but the interest is wonderfully weU sus- 
tained in spite of this. It is a narrative, which reminds us of Mil- 
ton, and with which Milton was familiar, of the redemption of man ; 
and its four parts are joined together under the common title of 
" Christ's Victory and Triumphs."* 

* GILES FLETCHER. 
From " Chris fs Victory in Heaven.^' 

But Justice had no sooner Mercy seen 

Smoothing the wrinkles of her Father's brow, 

But up she starts, and throws herself between : — 
As when a vapour from a moory slough. 
Meeting with fresh Eotis, that hut now 

Open'd the world which all in darkness lay, 

Doth heav'n's bright face of his rays disarray, 
And sads the smiling orient of the springing day. 

She was a virgin of austere regard ; 
Not, as the world esteems her, deaf and hlind ; 

But as the eagle, that hath oft compared 

Her eye with heav'n's, so and more hrightly shined 
Her lamping sight : for she the same could wind 

Into the solid heart ; and with her ears 

The silence of the thought loud-speaking hears ; 
And in one hand a pair of even scales she wears. 

No riot of affection revel kept 

Within her hreast ; but a still apathy 
Possessed all her soul, which softly slept, 

Securely, without tempest : no sad cry 

Awakes her pity : but wrong'd poverty, 
Sending his eyes to heav'n swimming in tears. 
With hideous clamours ever struck her ears. 
Whetting the blazing sword that in her hand she bears. 



278 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

8. Not easily distinguishable from our last kind of poems, in some 
points, are the Pastorals, a kind of composition which probably 
gave birth, early in the seventeenth century, to a larger array of 
attractive passages of verse than any other. From Spenser on- 
wards, there was hardly any poet but contributed to the stock, if it 
were nothing more than a ballad or a rural dialogue. The ex- 
ample of the Italians, too, prompted the dramatists to bring on the 
stage the imaginatively adorned picture of rustic life : and among 
the finest works of the time were Fletcher's " Faithful Shepherdess," 
and " The Sad Shepherd" of Jonson. 

In the more ambitious attempts at the Eclogue, one of the most 
curious features is the air of nationality and local truth which, 
almost always, the poets put on. Four collections of Eclogues were 
the chief. Warner's " Albion's England" has been called, not in- 
aptly, an enormous ballad on the legendary history of our country. 
Its most obvious fault is the awkwardness with which it oscillates 
between the rude sunplicity of the ballad, and the regularity of the 
sustained narrative poem : but it contains some very pleasing pas- 
sages in a quiet strain. Drayton's " Eclogues" are hardly worthy 
of him ; but we might fairly refer to the same class his delightful 
fairy ballad, called " Nymphidia." Wither, best known in his own 
time as a controversial writer on the side of the Puritans, wrote, 
principally in early life, poems which are among the most pleasing 
in our language, delicately fanciful, and always pure both in taste 
and in morals. Some of the best of these are the pastoral dialogues 
called " The Shepherd's Hunting," which have more of thoughtful 
reality than most works of the kind. Browne's poems are delight- 
fully rich in the description of landscapes, and in aU their accessory 
ornaments, but deficient in dramatic force, and tediously long. His 
connected poem, called '' Britannia's Pastorals," is especially abun- 
dant in fine pictures, and especially verbose : his " Shepherd's 
Pipe" attempts the baUad-style with small success. 
b. 1563. ) ^' '^^^ " Poly-Olbion," the largest and most celebrated 
d. 1631. j work of Drayton, is in its outline Descriptive. But it 
may serve us also as a point of connexion between the Pastoral 
Poem and the Didactic, while it has very close relations to the His- 
torical. It is designed, without disguise, to furnish a topographical 
description of England ; a purpose so dangerously prosaic, as to 
deserve in an eminent degree the ban, which condemns, as going 
out of the sphere of poetry, aU poems whose main design is instruc- 
tion. Huge in length, as well as injudicious in purpose, Drayton's 
work has seldom perhaps been read from beguming to end ; but no 
one susceptible of poetic beauty can look into any part of it, with- 



Drayton's poly-olbion. 279 

out being fascinated and longing to read more. There is not in 
existence any instance so signal, of fine fancy and feeling, and great 
command of pure and strong language, thrown almost utterly away. 
Beautiful natural objects, striking national legends, recent facts, and 
ingenious allegorical and mythological inventions, are all lavished 
on this thankless design.* 

An older didactic poet, Fulke Greville lord Brooke, who de- 
sired to have it written on his grave, that he was the friend of Su' 
Philip Sidney, exhibits, in his " Treatise of Human Learning," less 
of poetical power, than of solemn ethical and philosophical thought, 
couched in diction strikingly pointed and energetic, though often 
very obscure. There is less of thinking, with more of fancy, in 
the poems of Sir John Davies : the one, on the ImmortaKty of the 

* MICHAEL DRAYTON. 

From the " Poly- Olbion." 

Lament over the decay of Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire. 

Oh Charnwood, be thou call'd the choicest of thy kind ! 
The like in any place what flood hath happ'd to find? 
No tract in all this isle, the proudest let her be, 
Can show a sylvan nymph for beauty like to thee. 
The satyrs and the fauns, by Dian set to keep 
Eough hills and forest-holts, were sadly seen to weep, 
When thy high- palmed harts, the sport of bows and hounds. 
By gripple borderers' hands were banished thy grounds. 
The Dryads that were wont about thy lawns to rove, 
To trip from wood to wood, and scud from grove to gTOve, 
On Sharpley that were seen, and Chadman's aged rocks, 
Against the rising sun to braid their silver locks, 
And with the harmless elves, on heathy Bardon's height, 
By Cynthia's colder beams to play them night by night, 
Exil'd their sweet abode, to poor bare commons fled : 
They, with the oaks that liv'd, now with the oaks are dead ! 

Who will describe to life a forest, let him take 
Thy surface tohims^elf ; nor shall he need to make 
Another form at all ; where oft ia thee is found 
Fine sharp but easy hills, which reverently are crown 'd 
With aged antique rocks, to which the goats and sheep 
(To him that stands remote) do softly seem to creep. 
To gnaw the little shrubs on their steep sides that grow : 
Upon whose other part, on some descending brow. 
Huge stones are hanging out, as though they down would drop ; 
Where undergrowing oaks on their old shoulders prop 
The others' hoary heads, which still seem to decltae. 
And in a dingle near, (ev'n as a place divine 
For contemplation fit,) an ivy-ceiled bower, 
As nature had therein ordain'd some sylvan power. 



280 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

Soul ; the other, solemn in spite of its title, " Orchestra, or a Poem 
on Dancing." From the generation after this, we have several 
writers of religious poems, who may most conveniently be referred 
to the same class. Two in particular, Herbert and Quarles, might 
likewise be taken as specimens of the oddest peculiarities charac- 
terizing Johnson's " metaphysical poets." One was " Holy George 
Herbert," by whose writuigs, both in prose and verse, not less than 
by the record of his life, the belief and offices of the Church of Eng- 
land are presented in their most amiable aspect. Herbert has been 
compared to Keble : Quarles has been truly said to be not unlike 
Young. The " Emblems," the best known of Quarles' works, are 
alternately striking and ridiculous. 

The Didactic poems run, naturally, both into the Satirical and 
into the Lyrical. 

The Satire, finding its way into every place where thought and 
action are not quite fettered, has, in rude forms, encountered us 
among the literary attempts of the middle ages. Near the close of 
the sixteenth century, a series of such poems, wearuig a more classical 
air than any that had preceded, was begun by the juvenile '' Satires" 
of Bishop Hall, which are full of strength and observation, not with- 
out poetry, but obscure in language. The Satires of Marston the 
dramatist, severe beyond the bounds of decency, followed soon: 
and then came those of Donne, as obscure as HalFs, and hardly in 
any respect better than they, but more widely known m recent 
times through Pope's modernized alterations of them. 

10. Our last class of poems, the Lyrical, may be understood as 
comprehending the Ode, the Sonnet, the Song, and other small 
compositions in which the poet's chief aim is the expression of his 
own moods of feeling. The kind of works thus described was, as 
it is in most societies that are at all cultivated, more abundant than 
any other. Eeally one of the most difficult kinds of poetry, it seems 
to be the easiest of all. Among the dramatists who have been named, 
there was hardly any who did not write something of this sort. Some 
of Shakspeare's songs, and not a few of his sonnets, are very fine.* 

* William Shakspeare. 

A Sonnet. 
That time of year thou may'st in me behold, 

When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
In me thou seest the twilight of such day 

As after sunset fadeth in the west, 
"Which by and by black night doth take away. 

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 



LYRICAL POEMS. 281 

Many of the lyrics of Jonson and Fletcher are exquisite. Not a 
few of our other poets owe their fame chiefly to their lyrics : and 
some which came to us from the age in question are among the 
most beautiful flowers in the poetic chaplet of our country.* 

The Pure Lyric, of which the Ode may be taken as an example, 
was not common in the earlier part of the period. Much more 
frequent were those mixed kinds, with which Narrative is incorpo- 
rated, (as in many specimens of the BaUad,) or Eeflection, as in 
the Sonnet and in many irregular Lyrico-didactic poems. Thus 
a good many pieces of Warner and Drayton might be considered 
as Lyrical Ballads : and the Sonnet was common from the time of 
Sidney and Spenser. Of the many Sonnet-writers, the best was 
the Scotsman Drummond of Hawthornden ; unless the palm may 
be contested by Daniel, some of whose sonnets are singularly beau- 
tiful. The eccentric Earl of Stirling, a better sonnetteer than most 
others, was decidedly inferior to these two. 

11. To the Lyrical class, in one or another of its mixed forms, 

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire 

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 
As the deathbed whereon it must expire, 

Consum'd with that which it was nourish 'd by. 
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong ; 
To love that well which thou must leave ere long. 

* Ben Jonson. 
Hymn to Diana^from Ms Play of " Cynthia's Hevels." 

Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair, 

Now the sun is laid to sleep, 
Seated in thy silver car, 

State in wonted manner keep : 
Hesperus entreats thy light, 
Goddess excellently bright ! 

Earth, let not thy curious shade 

Dare itself to interpose : 
Cynthia's shining orb was made 

Heav'n to clear, when day did close : 
Bless us then with wished sight, 
Goddess excellently bright ! 

Lay thy bow of pearl apart, 

And thy crystal shining quiver ; 
Give unto the flying hart 

Space to breathe, how short soever ; 
Thou that mak'st a day of night, 
Goddess excellently bright ! 



282 THE ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 

belong many of the poems of Donne, which, with affectations and 
conceits as bad as any thing to be found in his century, are in many 
passages wonderfully fine, both for picturesque fancy and for sug- 
gestive pointedness of diction.* The poems of Herrick, the best of 
which are short snatches of verse, are always lyrical ia substance 
and usually so in form. In graceful fancy and dehcate expression, 
many of them are unsm^passed and inimitable : in subject and in 
moral tone they vary astonishingly, from amorous addresses, often 
indecently expressed, to the utmost warmth of devout aspiration.f 

* John Donne. 
The Message of a Lover to Ms False Mistress. 
Send home my long-stray'd eyes to me, 
Whicli, (oil, too long !) have dwelt on thee, 
But, if they there have learned such ill, 

Such forc'd fashions 

And false passions. 

That they be. 

Made by thee. 
Fit for no good sight, keep them still ! 

Send home my harmless heart again. 
Which no unworthy thought could stain : 
But, if it be taught by thine 

To make jestings 

Of protestiags, 

And break both 

"Word and oath, 
Keep it still : 'tis none of mine ! 

Yet, send me back my heart and eyes, 
That I may know and see thy lies ; 
And may laugh and joy when thou 

Art in anguish. 

And dost languish 

For some one 

That will none. 
Or prove as false as thou dost now ! 

t ROBERT HERRICK. 
Address to the Meadows in Winter. 
Ye have been fresh and green, 

Ye have been fill'd with flowers: 
And ye the walks have been. 

Where maids have spent their hours. 
Ye have beheld where they 

With wicker arks did come, 
To kiss and bear away 

The richer cowslips home. 



MINOR POETS AND MILTON, 283 

Cowley, one of the latest, and without any exception the most cele- 
brated, among the lyrists who have been classed in the metaphysical 
school, has been very variously estimated by different critics. That 
he was a man of extraordinary poetic susceptibility and fancy, can- 
not be doubted ; and his poems abound in short passages exceed- 
ingly beautiful : but his very activity of thought made him more 
prone than almost any other poet of his time, to strained analogies 
and unreal refinements. Among minor lyi-ical poets, to whom we 
owe poems still worthy to be read, it is enough to name such as 
Carew, Ayton, and Habington ; along with whom might perhaps be 
placed m our list Suckling, Lovelace, and several others. 

Two names have been reserved to the close of the series, because 
those who bore them were, especially in point of language, a sort of 
link between the time before the Restoration and that which fol- 
lowed. Denham's " Cooper's Hill," a poem of reflective descrip- 
tion, was so good a piece of heroic verse that it did not leave very 
much for Dryden to effect in the improvement of that measure. The 
diversified poems of Waller, especially those which hovered between 
the didactic sphere and the lyric, were remarkable advances in ease 
and correctness both of diction and of versification. 

THE POETRY OF JOHN MILTON. 

12. The poetry of the imaginative period w^hich began with 
Spenser, closes yet more nobly with Milton. He, standing in some 
respects as far apart from his stern contemporaries of the Common- 
wealth, as he stood from those who debased literature in the age of 
the Restoration, does yet belong rather to the older period than the 
newer. 

His youth received its intellectual nourishment in the last days 
of the old monarchy. While the beautiful images of Greek and 
Roman antiquity warmed his mind with a delight which never 
forsook it, the recent literatm-e of his native tongue was studied 

You've heard them sweetly sing, 

And seen them in a rovind, 
Each virgin like a Spring 

"With honeysuckles crown 'd. 
But now we see none here, 

"Whose silvery feet did tread, 
And with dishevell'd hair 

Adorn 'd this smoother mead. 
Like vmthrifts, having spent 

Your stock, and needy grown, 
You're left here to lament 

Your poor estates alone. 



284 THE POETRY OF JOHN MILTON. 

quite as eagerly and admiringly ; and a love hardly less intense was 
kindled towards those wild pictures of knighthood and magic, which 
were painted in the romances of the middle ages. No poet, hardly 
Virgil himself, has ever claimed more boldly the self-assumed pre- 
rogative, which genius uses in appropriating the thoughts of its 
predecessors ; and none has ever more felicitously transformed the 
borrowed stores, so as to make the new image truly origuial. His 
imitations of the older English poets are innumerable : so are his 
borrowings from the classics : and liis delight in the artless liter- 
ature and the shadowy traditions of the early times, tempted him, 
when young, to contemplate, as the great task of his life, a chival- 
rous poem on the exploits and fate of King Arthur. If this de- 
sign had been executed, the English tongue might have received 
a monument rivaUuig the Italian epics of the sixteenth century. 
Those early visions still dwelt in his mind, after his aspirations had 
been fixed on objects higher and more solemn. The classical 
allusions in all his writings are as numerous as fine; and hardly 
less often does he enliven and vary his descriptions of sacred things, 
by passages in which he clothes, with a more majestic beauty than 
their own, his chivalrous and romantic recollections. But, like that 
fervid pleasure in external nature which glowed still more brightly 
when the earth had become dark to the poet's eye, his classicism 
and his fondness for romance became but subordinate as guides to 
his thoughts and wishes. Poetical dreams made way for the action 
and reflection of one who was at once a religious man, a states- 
man, and a man of business. Diplomatic papers, and controversial 
treatises, sometimes mixed with matter of more permanent interest, 
diverted from its higher offices the energetic mind, in which, never- 
theless, there was ever brooding the thought of a poetical work 
more ambitious and more vast than any of those that had been 
fancied in his youthful hours. At length, amidst evil men and in 
the gloom of evil days, the great idea was matured ; and the Chris- 
tian epic, chanted at first when there were few disposed to hear, 
became an enduring monument of genius and learning and art, never 
perhaps destined to gain the favour of the many, but always cherished 
and reverenced by all who love poetry inspired by high genius, and 
who honour, most of all, poetry which is consecrated to holiness and 
virtue. 

13. The prodigal variety of Milton's imagination, and the delicate 
tenderness of feeling which was overshadowed by the solemnity of 
his great work, are exhibited in those poems which he wrote in 
early manhood, before his mmd had been made stern by the turmoil 
of active life in a turbulent age. It is not too much to say, that 



Milton's minor poems. 285 

tliose early poems would, if he had given us nothing else, vindicate 
his superiority to all the poets of his period, except Shakspeare and 
Spenser. The most popular of them, the descriptive pieces of 
" L'Allegro," and " II Penseroso," are perhaps perfect hi their kind, 
and certainly the best in their kind that any language actually pos- 
sesses. Never was voice given, more sweetly, to the echo which 
the loveliness of inanimate nature awakens in the poetic heart : 
never were the feelings of that heart invested with a finer medium 
of communication through images drawn from things without. In 
the " Comus," Milton gave vent to that hearty admiration, with 
which he regarded the dramati.=ts of the preceding generation. He 
here emulates the most poetical form of composition which they 
had adopted ; the Masque, a pageant designed for court and other 
festivals, usually interspersed with lyrical pieces, and, if not mytho- 
logical or allegorical, at least open everywhere to free imaginative 
adornment. For exhibition either of intense passion, or of strongly 
developed character, such a composition gives no adequate scope. 
There is not in our tongue any poem of similar length, from which 
could be culled a larger collection of passages that are exquisite for 
imagination, for sentiment, or for the musical flow of the rhythm, in 
which indeed the majestic swell of the poet's later blank verse begins 
to be heard. The "Arcades " may be described as a weaker effort of 
the same sort. The elegy called " Lycidas" is one of the fullest 
examples of the author's poetical learning, and of the skill with 
which he used his materials. It is in form Italian, and brimful of 
classical allusion ; unattractive to most minds, but delightful to 
those which are trained liighly enough to relish the most refined 
idealism of thought, and the most delicate skill of construction. 
The Ode on the Nativity has been pronounced to be, perhaps, the 
finest in the English language. 

Much less poetical than these youthful works, are those with 
which the great poet closed his course. The " Paradise Eegained" 
abounds with passages which in themselves are in one way or 
another beautiful : but the plan is poorly conceived ; and the didac- 
tic tendency, which the defective design created, prevails to weari- 
someness as the work proceeds.* Nor is the " Samson Agonistes" 

* JOHN MILTON. 
From " Paradise Eegained." 
Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount. 
Westward, much nearer by south-west, behold 
Where on the .^gean sea a city stands 
Built nobly ; pure the air and light the soil ; 
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 



286 THE POETRY OF JOHN MILTON, 

by any means so successful an imitation of the Greek drama, as the 
" Comus" had been of Jonson and Fletcher. It wears a striking 
air of solemnity, rising indeed into a higher sphere than that of its 
classical models ; but it is neither impassioned, nor strong in char- 
acter, nor poetical in its lyrical parts. It is an interesting proof of 
that long-cherished fondness for the dramatic form of composition, 
which shows itself in the structure even of his epics, and which had 
tempted him to begm the " Paradise Lost" in the form of a play. 

14. That the theme of Paradise Lost is the noblest which any 
poet ever chose, and that yet its very grandeur may make it the 
less pleasing to many readers, are points that wiU be admitted by 
all. If we say that the theme is managed with a skill almost un- 
equalled, the plan laid down and executed with extraordinary exact- 
ness of art, we make assertions which are due to the poet, but on the 
correctness of which few of his readers are qualified to judge. Like 
other great works, and m a higher degree than most, the poem is 

And eloquence, native to famous wits 

Or hospitable in her sweet recess, 

City or suburban, studious walks and shades. 

See there the olive grove of Academe, 
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird 
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long : 
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound 
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites 
To studious musing : there Ilyssus rolls 
His whispering stream. Within the walls then view 
The schools of ancient sages ; his who bred 
Great Alexander to subdue the world ; 
Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next : 
There shalt thou hear and learn the secret power 
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit 
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse, 
iEolian charms, and Dorian lyric odes ; 
And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, 
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called, 
Whose poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. 
Thence, what the lofty grave tragedians taught 
In chorus or iambic, teachers best 
Of moral prudence with delight received 
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat 
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life ; 
High actions and high passions best describing : 
Thence to the famous orators repair, 
Those ancients, whose resistless eloquence 
Wielded at will that fierce democratic. 
Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece, 
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne. 



THE PARADISE LOST. 287 

oftenesl studied and estimated by piecemeal only. Though it be so 
taken, and though its unbroken and weighty solemnity should at 
length have caused ^yeariness, it cannot but have left a vivid impres- 
sion on all minds not quite unsusceptible of fine influences. The 
stately marcli of its diction ; the organ-peal with which its versifica- 
tion rolls on; the continual overflowing, especially in the earlier 
books, of beautiful illustrations from nature or art ; the clearly and 
brightly coloured pictures of human happiness and innocence ; the 
melancholy grandeur Avith which angelic natures are clothed in then- 
fall : these are features, some or all of which must be delightful to 
most of us, and which give to the mind images and feelings not 
easily or soon effaced. If the poet has sometimes aimed at describ- 
ing scenes, over which should have been cast the veU of reverential 
silence, we shall remember that this occurs but rarely. If other 
scenes and figures of a supernatural kind are invested with a costume 
which may seem to us unduly corporeal even for the poetic inventor, 
we should pause to recollect that the task thus attempted is one in 
which perfect success is unattainable ; and we shall ourselves, unless 
om- fancy is cold indeed, be awed and dazzled, whether we will 
or not, by many of those very pictures. 

" The most strikmg characteristic of the poetry of Milton, is the 
extreme remoteness of the associations by means of which it acts 
on the reader. Its effect is produced, not so much by what it 
expresses, as by what it suggests ; not so much by the ideas 
which it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are comiected 
with them. He electrifies the mind through conductors. The 
most unimaginative man must understand the Iliad ; Homer gives 
him no choice ; but takes the whole on himself, and sets his 
images in so clear a light that it is impossible to be blind to them. 
Milton does not paint a finished picture, or play for a mere pas- 
sive listener. He sketches, and leaves others to fill up the out- 
line : he strikes the key-note, and expects his hearer to make out 
the melody."* 

* Macaulay : Essays from the Edinburgh Eeview. 



288 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE AGE OF THE EESTORATION AND THE EEVOLUTION. 

A. D. 1660— A. D. 1702. 

Charles XL, 1660-1685. 

James II., 1685-1687. 

William IIL, 1688-1702. 

1. Social and Literary Character of the Period. — Peose. 2. Theology — 
Leighton — Sermons of South, Tillotson, and Barrow — Nonconformist 
Divines — Bimyan's Pilgrim's Progress — The Philosophy of Locke — Bent- 
ley and Classical Learning. — 3. Antiquaries and Historians — Lord Claren- 
don's History — Bishop Burnet's Histories. — 4. Miscellaneous Prose — 
Walton — Evelyn — L'Estrange — Butler and Marvell — John Dryden's 
Prose Writings — His Style — His Critical Opinions — Temple's Essays. — 
Poetry. 5. Dramas — Their Character — French Influences — Dryden's 
Plays — Tragedies of Lee, Otway, and Southeme — The Prose Comedies 
— Their Moral Foulness. — 6. Poetry Not Dramatic — Its Didactic and 
Satiric Character — Inferences. — 7. Minor Poets — Roscommon — Marvell 
— Butler's Hudibras — Prior. — 8. John Dryden's Life and Works. — 9. 
Dryden's Poetical Character. 

1. The last forty years of the seventeenth century will not occupy 
us long. Their aspect is, on the whole, far from being pleasant ; and 
some features, marking many of their literary works, are positively 
revolting. 

In the reign of Charles the Second, England, whether we have 
regard to the political, the moral, or the literary state of the nation, 
resembled a fine antique garden, neglected and falling into decay. 
A few patriarchal trees still rose green and stately ; a few chance- 
sown flowers began to blossom m the shade : but lawn and parterre 
and alley were matted with noisome weeds ; and the stagnant waters 
breathed out pestilential damps. When, after the Revolution, the 
attempt was made to re-introduce order and productiveness, many 
of the wild plants were allowed stiU to cumber the ground ; and 
there were compartments which, worn out by the rank vegetation 
they had borne, became for a time altogether barren. In a word, 
the Restoration brought in evils of all kinds, many of which lingered 
through the age that succeeded, and others were not eradicated for 
several generations. 

Of all the social mischiefs of the time, none infected literature so 
deeply as that depravation of morals, into which the court and the 



MORAL AND LITEEAEY ASPECT. 289 

aristocracy plunged, and into which so many of the people followed 
them. The lighter kmds of composition mirrored faithfully the 
surrounding blackness. The drama sank to a frightful grossness : 
the tone of thiaking was lowered also in other walks of poetry. 
The coarseness of speech survived the close of the century : the 
cool, selfish, calculating spirit, which had been the more tolerable 
form of the degradation, survived, though in a mitigated degree, 
very much longer. This bad morality was in part attributable to a 
second characteristic of the time, which produced likewise other 
consequences. The reinstated courtiers imported a mania for foreign 
models, especially French. The favourite literary works, instead of 
continuing to obey native and natural impulses, were anxiously 
moulded on the tastes of Paris. This prevalence of exotic predi- 
lections endured for more than a century. 

Amidst all these and other weaknesses and blots, there was not 
wanting either strength or brightness. The literary career of Dry- 
den covers the whole of our period, and marks a change which con- 
tained improvement in several features. Locke was the leader of 
philosophical speculation : and mathematical and physical science, 
little dependent on the political or moral state of the times, had its 
active band of distinguished votaries headed by Newton ; 

" a mind for ever 

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone !" 
That philosophy and science did not even then neglect goodness, or 
despise religion, is proved by the names which we have last read ; and, 
in. many other quarters, there were uttered, though to inattentive 
ears, stern protests against evil, which have echoed from age to age 
till they reached ourselves. Those voices issued from not a few of 
the high places of the church ; and others were lifted up, sadly but 
firmly, in the midst of persecution. The Act of Uniformity, by 
sUencing the puritan clergy, actually gave to the ablest of them a 
greater power at the time, and a power which, but for this, would 
not so probably have bequeathed to us any record. The Noncon- 
formists wrote and printed, when they were forbidden to speak. A 
younger generation was growing up among them : and some of the 
elder race still survived ; such as the fiery Baxter, the calm Owen, 
and the prudent Calamy. Greatest Of all, and only now reaching 
the climax of his strength, Milton sat in the narrow chamber of his 
neglected old age : bating no jot of hope, yielding no point of honesty, 
abjuring no word or syllable of faith ; but consoling himself for the 
disappointments which had darkened a weary life, by consecrating 
its waning years, with redoubled ardour of devotion, to religion, to 
truth, and to the service of a remote posterity. 

N 



290 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 



PROSE LITERATURE. 

2. Among tkose good and able Churchmen, who passed from the 
troubles of the Commonwealth and Protectorate to the seeming vic- 
tory but real danger of the Eestoration, were Jeremy Taylor, and 
several other men of eminence. Of those who, so situated, have not 
yet been named, the earliest we encounter is Leighton, Ai-chbishop 
of Grlasgow ; a man whose apostolic gentleness of conduct endeared 
him deeply to his contemporaries, and whose devoutly meditative 
eloquence made him, in our own day, the bosom-oracle of Coleridge. 

Much more famous, and possessed of much greater natural power, 
were three Theologians whose writings, aU able and learned, yet want 
the charm of sentiment which Leighton's warmth of heart diffuses 
over all his works. These were South, Tillotson, and Barrow. 
b. 1633. "I South was a man of remarkable oratorical endowments : 
d. 1716. j but probably no one would now claim for him a high rank 
as a Christian preacher. Dogmatical, sarcastic, and intolerant; 
shrewd in practical observation, unhesitatingly abundant in familiar 
wit, and possessing a wonderful stock of vigorous and idiomatic 
phrases : he is often impressively strong in his denunciation of 
prevailmg vices, stronger still when he ridicules clerical brethren, 
(as in his parody of Taylor's peculiarities,) and strongest of all in 
fierce polemical attacks on papists, and nonconformists, and all 
6. 1630. ) dissenters from the Church of England. TiUotson's writ- 
d. 1694. j ings are pervaded by a much higher and better spirit. They 
are not only kindly and forbearing towards opponents, but warmly 
earnest in their inculcation of religious belief and duty. But, in 
point of eloquence, he never rises above what has justly been 
called a noble sim-plicity : his fancy prompts to him no striking 
illustrations ; and his style always tends to being both clumsy and 
feeble. His fame as a preacher must have been owing, m a great 
degree, to the well-founded reliance which was placed on his sound 
judgment and excellent character, and to the ability with which 
he combated the papal doctrines on the one hand and those of 
Z/. 1630.) t^6 puritans on the other. Barrow's sermons cannot but 
d. 1677. ) strike every one as being the works of a great thinker : they 
are, in truth, less properly orations, than trains of argumentative 
thought. His reasoning is prosecuted with an admhable union 
of comprehensiveness, sagacity, and clearness : and it is expressed 
in a style which, at once strong and regular, combines many of the 
virtues of the older writers with not a few of those that were appear- 
ing in the new. 

In this age, however, we have lost, almost wholly, that force of un- 



THEOLOGrlCAL WRITINGS. 291 

disciplined eloquence, whicli had been so commanding in the first half 
of the century. None of the writers that have been named come 
nearly up to the point : and there is still less of the old strength of 
impressiveness m those divines who, like Stillingfleet, Pearson, Bur- 
net, Bull, and the elder Sherlock, hold a more prominent place in 
the history of the church than in that of letters. 

Among the contributors to theological literature were several of 
the leading men of scierce. Barrow was one of the gi-eatest mathe- 
maticians of our country : Bishop Wilkins was one of the founders 
of the Royal Society. Such also were three distinguished laymen : 
the amiable and excellent Boyle ; Ray, a Nonconformist, m whose 
writings are to be found the principles of the Natural System of 
Botany ; and the philosopher whose name would alone have made 
the age immortal, the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton. 

The Nonconformist clergy were active writers, casting bread on 
the waters, to be fomid after many days. But, though Baxter lived 
to see the Revolution, he has already been named among the men 
of that pre^-ious generation, to which in spnit he belonged : nor 
were there in the younger race any who, in a literary view, are 
entitled to be ranked as his equals. Yet the excellent John 
6. iGSO.") Howe, whose "Living Temple" is still one of our religi- 
d. 1705. J Q^g classics, was not far from being worthy of a place by 
his side. At once through his enlightened kindliness, and his con- 
templative piety, he merited to be described by Baxter as heavenly- 
minded : and, though his turn of style has little regularity or com- 
pactness, and his diction no fine felicities of genius, there are in his 
works not a few passages that rise, nearer than anything of his 
time, towards the old force of eloquent persuasiveness. Owen, 
esteemed highly as a theologian, alike sound, and able, and learned, 
is a very indifferent writer: to the praise of eloquence he has no 
claim whatever ; nor is he very clear in thinking, or very precise in 
style. The pious Flavel, and other authors of the class, possess 
still less literary importance. But the great though mitrained 
b. 1628. 1 genius of Bunyan may most conveniently be commemorated 
d. 1688. J iiere ; unless indeed we were, in \irtue of the form of his best 
work, to set him down in another department, as a writer of 
romances. The fervently religious temper of " The Pilgrun's Pro- 
gress" needs no commendation; and as little do the richness of 
characteristic representation, the ingenuity of analogy, and the 
semi-scriptural force and quaintness of style, which have placed 
the name of the self-trained tinker of Bedford on the file of our 
permanent literature. 

J. 1632. \ Last among the rehgious wi-iters, Jolm Locke might be 
d. 1704. j named, in virtue of some of his works. This celebrated 



292 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

man may be taken as the representative of the English Philosophy 
of the time. His influence on speculative opinions in his own day 
was only second to that of Hobbes ; while by and by it became 
paramomit, being indeed, in regard to the leading problems of 
metaphysics, an offshoot from, the same root. The philosophical 
value of Locke's system is a matter of controversy ; especially 
between English thinkers on the one hand, and the followers of 
the Scottish school, or the German, on the other. But no one that 
is well acquainted with his "Essay concerning Human Under- 
standing," can refuse him very high praise, as a patient and singu- 
larly acute cultivator of that experimental and tentative kind of 
psychological analysis, from which has been gathered so much of 
valuable fruit. His merits as a writer are not very distinguished, 
his style being neither elegant, vigorous, nor exact. 

The Classical Learning of this period was respectable, but can 
hardly be called high, with the exception of Gale, till we reach the 
h. 1662. ") name of Bentley, the greatest of all British scholars. He, 
d. 1742. J at the close of the seventeenth century, was in the flower 
of his age, and occupied in triumphantly closing his controversy on 
the genumeness of the Epistles of Phalaris ; a curious instance of 
the possibility of giving- importance to trifling questions, by using 
them as an occasion for raising greater ones. The dispute, indeed, 
besides bringing out Bentley's admirable contributions to Greek 
philology, history, and criticism, both began and ended in a discus- 
sion on the comparative importance of ancient and modern literature. 

3. When we turn to the Historical field, we find several indus- 
trious collectors of materials, among whom may be named Wood, 
Dugdale, and Rymer. There is a dearth of compositions sufii- 
ciently original or systematic to deserve the name of history. But 
two of our most famous historians may most conveniently be referred 
to this period. Lord Clarendon's writings were partly composed be- 
fore its beginning : those of Bishop Burnet extended beyond its close. 
6. 1608.'> Clarendon's " History of the Rebellion" indicates by its 
d.i674.j" title the opinions of the author, one of the best and ablest 
men among the royalists, though too little of a partisan to be always 
acceptable to his own party. Its historical value is small in respect 
of minute accm*acy, but great when we regard it as a picture of the 
times ; and its portraits of characters, drawn with remarkable pre- 
cision and spirit, give to the work a literary merit which is very 
distinguished. But he is not an animated narrator ; and the 
mechanism of his style is very poor. He wants both the regularity 
of the newer writers and the vigour of the old : and of the improve- 
ments which were beginning to show themselves he may be said to 
have only one, namely, a less inverted method of arrangement. He 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE WRITINGS. 293 

is not only tedious and verbose, but also complex in construction ; 
heaping up parenthetical explanations till the meaning of a sentence 
has often to be guessed at like a riddle. He writes with the care- 
lessness of a man of business ; while his diplomatic and legal habits 
have disqualified hhn from gaining the clearness and precision which 
h. 1643. ) even memoranda of business-matters ought to possess. Bur- 
<f.i7i5.j net'S' " History of the Eeformation" is one of the most thor- 
oughly digested works of the century : and his carelessly written 
" History of His Own Times," while it expresses opinions very dif- 
ferent from those of the writer named last before him, is extremely 
valuable for many of its facts, and for the cool shrewdness with which 
he describes the state of things about him. He has as little elo- 
quence as Clarendon ; but, writing long after him, he had acquired 
a style which partakes fairly of the improvements of his time. 

4. Miscellaneous writings in prose were more numerous than uu- 
portant. Partly to the time of the commonwealth belong those of 
b. 1593. ) Izaak Walton, a London tradesman, who wrote some sin- 
d.i683.j gulaiiy interesting biographies, and the quaint and half- 
poetical treatise on Angling, through which his name, and that of 
his friend Cotton, are preserved and extensively known. Both in 
diction and in sentiment, these works remind us forcibly of the 
preceding age : and Walton, surviving Milton, might be held as 
finally closing the series of Old English prose writers. 

John Evelyn, a highly accomplished and excellent man, wrote, 
in the leisure of wealth, several useful and tasteful works, the style 
of which is singularly polished for the time. In strong contrast 
both to -' The Complete Angler " of Walton, and to Evelyn's 
" Sylva," were the numberless controversial pamphlets, newspaper 
essays, and translations, manufactured by Sir Koger L'Estrange. 
This venal man, and worthless scribbler, may serve as a specimen 
of the hack authors who became so numerous in his time, and of 
the kind of services which merited knighthood from the govern- 
ment of the Restored House of Stuart. But scurrility and vulgar- 
ism did not always fill up the place of talent. Two men of genu- 
ine wit and humour, whose versified compositions will immediately 
come in our way, were likewise writers of excellent prose. Samuel 
Butler, the unfortunate and ill-requited laureate of the royahsts, 
threw his satire of the puritans and republicans into a metrical 
form, in his celebrated " Hudibras." But he left some exceedingly 
vigorous and witty prose writings ; the best of which is a series of 
" Characters," resembling those with which we became acquainted 
h. 1620. > i'^ ^^1^ preceding period. Andrew Marvell, the friend and 
d. 1678. j protector of Milton, and the member of parliament who 
astonished Charles the Second's ministers by refusing to be bribed, 



294 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

was witty even in the letters in which he regularly reported his pro- 
ceedings to his constituents in Hull. There is still greater force of 
wit, most successful in the form of sarcastic irony, in his satirical 
attacks on the High- Church opinions and doings. 

Among those whose livelihood was earned by literature was, 
unfortunately both for his happiness, his fame, and his virtue, 
1. 1631. "I John Dryden himself, the literary chief of the whole in- 
tz.i700.j terval between Cromwell and Queen Anne. His prose 
writings, besides the comedies, are few, embracing, indeed, hardly 
anything beyond dedications and critical prefaces. In these, how- 
ever, he not only taught principles of poetical art previously un- 
known to his countrymen, but showed the capabilities of the Eng- 
lish tongue in a new light. He has passages which, while their an- 
is almost perfectly modern, unite spirit with grace of style, as com- 
pletely as any which modern times have been able to produce. 

In regard to the poetical art, as in regard to more practical ques- 
tions, Dryden's opinions were far from being fixed or consistent. 
But the position which he held, in most respects, will be understood 
from his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy;" which, while it may fairly 
stand as the earliest attempt in our language at systematizing the 
laws of poetry, was carefully written, and as carefully revised by 
the author. It is constructed, with much liveliaess, in the form of 
a dialogue, the writer and three of the literary courtiers being, the 
speakers. The main business of the conversation is a comparison 
between the English Drama and that of France, whose rules were 
now attracting much attention in England. On one point, the sub- 
stitution of rhyme for our blank verse in tragedy, the decision is 
given in favour of the French practice ; from which, however, at 
a later stage, Dryden himself departed. As to all other questions 
of importance, the victory is given to the speakers who defend the 
native drama ; while a tribute of warm admiration is paid to Shak- 
speare and Jonson.* 

* JOHN DRYDEN. 
From " An Essay of Dramatic Poesy :^'' puUislied in 1668 ; and again, '>mth 

revision^ in 1684. 
The extract is from a speech put into the mouth of Sir Charles Sedley, who, 
in the dialogue, is the advocate of the French Drama. 
And now I am speaking of Eelations, I cannot take a fitter opportunity 
to add this in favour of the French ; that they often use them with better 
judgment, and more apropos, than the English do. Not that I commend 
Narrations in general. But there are two sorts of them : one of those things 
which are antecedent to the play, and are related to make the conduct of it 
more clear to us : but it is a fault to choose such subjects for the stage as 
will force us on that rock; because we see they are seldom listened to by the 



THE PROSE OF DRYDEN AND TEMPLE. 295 

Much inferior to Dryden in vigour of thought, but not much 
h. 1628. ) below him in the mechanism of style, was Sh William 
d. 1698. j Temple, who indeed may share with him the merit of hav- 
ing founded regular English prose. Long employed as a statesman 
and diplomatist, this accomplished person left few wi'itings, besides 
his correspondence, and his historical and statistical memohs. His 
favourite topics intrude themselves, and the muiute manner of 
treating everything is exhibited, in those miscellaneous Essays on 
which chiefly his literary character rests. His essay " Of Garden- 
ing " is full of good sense and good descriptions. In the essay 
" Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning," and the supplementary 
treatise, he takes the classical side ; and the same opinions are sup- 
ported, with much more of spirited writing, in the essay ''Of Poetry." 
In the latter only is any account taken of English Literature : and 
it is treated in the fashion of a man who knew very little of it, and 
secretly despised what he did know. Sidney, the oldest of our 

audience, and that is many times the ruin of the play : for, being once let pass 
•without attention, the audience can never recover themselves to understand 
the plot. And, indeed, it is somewhat um-easonable that they should be put 
to so much trouble, as that, to comprehend what passes in their sight, they 
must have recourse to what was done, perhaps, ten or twenty years ago. 

But there is another sort of Relations, that is, of things happening in the 
action of the play, and supposed to be done behind the scenes ; and this is 
many times both convenient and beautiful : for by it the French avoid the 
tumult to which we ai-e subject in England, by representing duels, battles, 
and the like ; which renders our stage too like the theatres where they fight 
prizes. For what is more ridiculous, than to represent an army with a drum 
and five men behind it ^ all which the hero of the other side is to drive in 
before him ? Or to see a duel fought, and one slain with two or three thrusts 
of the foils, which we know are so blunted, that we might give a man an 
hour to kill another in good earnest with them ? 

I have observed, that, in all our tragedies, the audience cannot forbear 
laughing when the actors are to die : it is the most comic part of the whole 
play. All passions naay be lively represented on the stage ; if, to the well 
writing of them, the actor supplies a good-commanded voice, and limbs that 
move easily, and without stiffciess : but there are many actions which can 
never be imitated to a just height. Dying, especially, is a thing which none 
but a Eoman gladiator could naturally perform on the stage, when he did 
not imitate or represent, but do it : and therefore it is better to omit the re- 
presentation of it. 

The words of a good writer, which describe it lively, will make a deeper 
impression of belief in us, than all the actor can insinuate into us, when he 
seems to fall dead before us; as a poet, in the description of a beautiful 
garden or a meadow, will please our imagination more than the place itself 
can please our sight. "When we see death represented, we are convinced it 
is but fiction : but, when we hear it related, our eyes (the strongest witnesses) 
are wanting, which might have undeceived us ; and we are all willing to 
favour the sleight, when the poet does not too grossly impose on us. 



296 THE EESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

poet ; Spenser is looked down on with a kind of compassion ; and 
Shakspeare is just allowed to have had some merit in comedy.* 
Wotton's answer to Temple, defending the literature of modern 
times, has, indeed, no brilliancy of any kind, and was ridiculed by 
the wits of the day : but it deserves honourable remembrance for 
its solid knowledge and sound judgment. The question was far 
from being thoroughly argued on either side. 

POETICAL LITERATURE. 

5. The example of symmetrical structure and artificial polishing, 
which had recently been set by the literature of France, evidently 
was not without influence, for good, on the whole, rather than e\Tl, 
on the style of English Prose after the Eestoration. The effects of 
Parisian taste on Poetry were not so beneficial. 

On the English Drama, however, the rules of the French critics 
operated but slowly. The formal observance of the unities has 
never become general among us ; and the reception of them hardly 
writers that is at all named, is declared to have been our greatest 

* SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 
From the " Essay of Poetry ;'''' pvhlished in 1689. 

Whether it be that the fierceness of the Gothic humours or noise of their 
perpetual wars frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the modern 
languages would not bear it ; certain it is, that the great heights and excel- 
lencj both of Poetry and Music fell with the Roman Learning and Empire, 
and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that before 
attended them. Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed 
to be the softest and sweetest, the most general and most innocent amuse- 
ments of common time and life. They still fin,d room in the courts of princes 
and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead 
calm of poor or idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and 
perturbations of the greatest and busiest men. And both these efi"ects are of 
equal use to human life : for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither 
agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager in a calm or in a storm, but is so 
to both when a little agitated by gentle gales ; and so the mind, when moved 
by soft and easy passions and affections. 

I know very well, that many, who pretend to be wise Iby the forms of 
being grave, are apt to despise both Poetry and Music, as toys and trifles, too 
light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find them- 
selves wholly insensible to these charms would, I think, do well to keep 
their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and bringing 
the goodness of their natures, if not of their understandings, into question. 
It may be thought an ill sign, if not an ill constitution. While this world 
lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and requests of these two entertainments 
will do so too ; and happy those that content themselves with these, or and 
other so easy and iimocent, and do not trouble the world or other men, be- 
cause they cannot be quiet themselves though nobody hurts ichem. 



THE DRAMAS OF DRYDEN AND OTHERS. 297 

took placBj in any instance worth noting, till the early years of the 
eighteenth century. The separation of tragedy from comedy, 
which had already been practised often by the Old English Drama- 
tists, became common much sooner. The French models by which 
our play- writers were first attracted, belonged to an older day, and 
a ruder school, than those of Racine and his followers in the regular 
drama. They prompted to Dryden the idea of his Heroic Plays, 
which are not unlike the wildest chivalrous romances, dressed up 
in modern sentimentalities, exaggerated into extravagant unreality of 
incident, and thrown into the form of dialogue with very little dra- 
matic skill. All the French serious plays, regular as well as irre- 
gular, concurred ia furnishing the unlucky example of rhymed dia- 
logue ; which however was not long followed, though supported for 
a time by all Dryden's energy. 

The worst effect of the foreign models was that which they had, 
in the case not of Dryden only but of our dramatic writers in gen- 
eral for several generations, on the notion which was entertained as 
to the true character of the dramatic poem. Our Tragic Dramas, 
while the writers aimed sedulously at making them poetical, really 
left off being dramatic. In a few years after the Restoration, most of 
them had ceased to be pictures of human beings in action : they were 
no more than descriptions of such pictures. They became, in their 
whole conception, imitations of that declamatory manner, which 
makes a regular French play to be little else than a series of beau- 
tiful recitations. While, likewise, the tragic writers, and Dryden 
himself among them, speedily returned to the use of blank verse, 
the Comic writers, guided perhaps in part by the undramatic char- 
acter which the serious dialogue had assumed, sank contentedly 
into familiar and unimaginative prose. 

On Dryden's Plays all the praise has been bestowed that is de- 
served, when it is said that the serious ones contain many very 
striking and poetical pieces of declamation, finely versified. Yet, 
in this walk as in others, Dryden was the literary chief of his time. 
His Comedies, doubtless, are bad in all respects, not morally only, 
but as dramas. They are much worse than those of Shadwell, the 
rival he so much disliked, in which there is a great deal of clumsy 
paintingthat looks very like real low-life. There is a greater display 
of poetry and Vehemence at least, if not of nature or of pathos, in 
those Tragic Inlays, in which Dryden imitated the rhyme of the 
French stage iind the extravagance of the French romances : and 
these, chiefly jhis earliest dramas, are far more spirited than those 
which he afterwards couched in blank verse. 

Lee, though j some eloquent passages from his tragedies have sur- 
i n2 



298 THE RESTOEATION AND REVOLUTION. 

vived; was really nothing more than a poor likeness of Dry den. 
There is something much nearer to a revival of the ancient strength 
of feeling, though alloyed by false sentiment and poetic poverty, 
in the "Orphan" and "Venice Preserved" of the imhappy 
Otway. Congreve, also, showed the power of writing the language 
of tragedy at least, if not of breathing its spirit very strongly : and 
there is not a little of nature and pathos in Southerne. 

In Comedy, very soon, the fame of Dryden and Shadwell was 
eclipsed by that of a small knot of dramatists, systematically adopt- 
ing prose instead of the old metrical language. The works of these 
authors are, morally, among the foulest things by which the litera- 
ture of any nation was ever disgraced. But, if this kind of dramatic 
writing is to be excused for wanting altogether the poetical or ideal, 
some of them must be acknowledged to have high skill as works 
of art. They are excellent specimens of that which has been called 
the Comedy of Manners, a dramatic exhibition of the externals of 
society. But vice is inextricably interwoven intt) the texture of all ; 
alike in the broad humour and lively incident of Wycherley, (the 
most vigorous of the set,) and in the wit of Congreve, the character- 
painting of Vanbrugh, and the lively, easy, mvention of Farquhar. 
It is difficult to avoid believing, that, in their pictures of licentious- 
ness and meanness, those men caricatured even the heartless and 
treacherous voluptuaries for whose diversion they wrote. 

6. T^Tien we tm*n from the Drama to other kinds of Poetry, we 
observe similar changes of taste ; changes which affected the art 
injuriously, and which, coming immediately from France, would 
yet, like the changes in the drama, have probably come soon though 
no such example had accelerated them. 

That, in constructing verse as in constructing prose, increased 
attention was paid to correctness and refinement, was a step of im- 
provement : and, although the writers of Louis the Fourteenth's 
court led the way, the process had to be performed independently 
and with original resources. 

The mischievous changes related both to the themes of poetry 
and to its forms. In neither of these respects can the true functions 
of the art be forgotten, without serious injury to the value of the 
work : and in both respects the poet, yielding, as the imaginative 
mind must always yield, to the prompting of the world he lives in, 
may be either raised above his natm-al power, or surik below it, by 
the temper and opinions of his time. An age must be held im- 
poetical, and cannot produce great poetical works, if its poetry 
chooses insufficient topics ; and especially if it attempts nothing 
higher than the imaginative embellishment of the present. We 



NON-DRAMATIC POETRY. 299 

have seen liow very differently the best poets of the Elizabethan reign 
occupied themselves. But in those whom we have now reached, 
the low choice was continually recm-ring ; and it produced a con- 
stant crop of poems, celebratmg events of contemporary history or 
incidents in the lives of individuals. Again, the form may be 
wrongly chosen as well as the theme ; and that either through a 
wrong choice of the theme, or without it. The Narrative Poem and 
the Dramatic are unquestionably the two kinds of poetry, in which 
may be worked out most powerfully that imaginative excitement of 
pleasing emotion, which is the immediate and characteristic end of 
the art. It is to those two kinds that all the greatest poems have 
belonged; and, where the cultivation of those kinds is rare, the 
poetry of the age cannot attain a high position. We have seen 
how zealously both were cultivated in the palmy days of our old 
poetry: we see a very different sight in the days of the Restoration. 
The drama, as we have learned, had lost, in gi-eat part, its poetic 
significance and elevation : original narrative poetry, as we next 
find, was hardly known. Again, next below the two highest kinds, 
stands Lyrical Poetry ; and it, although it was now cultivated, was 
not the favoiu*ite sort, nor was treated in a poetical spirit. Almost 
all the most famous poems of the day may be referred to the class of 
the Didactic. Now, it must be asserted, the prevalence of didactic 
poetry is a palpable symptom of an unpoetical age ; of an age that 
either misunderstands theoretically the function of poetry, or wants 
imaginative strength to do its part in the creation of poetical works. 
Satire itself, available as it has been made incidentally by poetic 
minds eminently endowed, cannot rank much higher than the didac- 
tic in the scale of poetical purity. In it, likewise, the last half of 
the seventeenth century was abundant. 

7. If all versifiers were poets, om* muster-roll from the reigns of 
Charles the Second and his next successors might vie in number 
with that of any period equally long. But it would be diverting, 
were it not so mortifying, to remark how dead a level the verse- 
making of those forty years maintains, when we have set aside 
a very few of the works. 

Amidst those dwarfish rhymers there yet lingered, for a time, 
some of the august shapes of a former age. Milton still walked 
on his solitary course, like one who had lost his way, a benighted 
traveller on a dreary road. "Waller's odes and occasional verses 
show hun to have been more at home. But, of names not abeady 
noted, there are positively no more than two or three, that really 
requhe or reward commemoration in studies so general as ours. 
It was a strangely pregnant evidence both of narrowness in thought, 



300 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

and of dulness of ear to the higher tones of the lyre, that one of the 
most famous poems of the day should have been an " Essay on 
Translated Verse." The author, Lord Eoscommon, was honour- 
ably distinguished by the moral purity of his writings : and the 
same merit, with that of much felicity, both in feeling and in dic- 
tion, may rescue likewise from forgetfulness the small poems of 
MarvelL* 

h. 1612. ) Butler's Hudibras, which perhaps belongs more properly 
d. 1680. J iQ i}yQ age before, is a work of genius, and a remarkable 
phenomenon m the history of our literature. His pungent wit ; his 
extraordinary ingenuity in drawing whim and jest out of the driest 
stores of learning ; his smgular command of apt and sterling words : 

* ANDREW MARVELL. 

The Emigrants' Hymn. 

Where the remote Bermudas ride 
In th' ocean's bosom unespy'd ; 
From a small boat that row'd along, 
The list'ning winds received this song. 

" What should we do but sing His praise, 
That led us through the wat'ry maze 
Unto an isle so long unknown, 
And yet far kinder than our own ! 
He gave us this eternal spring, 
Which here enamels every thing ; 
And sends the fowls to us in care 
On daily visits through the air. 
He hangs in shades the orange bright, 
Like golden lamps in a green night ; 
And does in the pomegranates close 
Jewels more rich than Ormuz shows. 
With cedars, chosen by his hand 
From Lebanon, He stores the land ; 
And makes the hollow seas that roar, 
Proclaim the ambergris on shore. 

He cast (of which we rather boast) 
The Gospel's pearl upon our coast ; 
And in these rocks for us did frame 
A temple where to sound His name. 

Oh ! let our voice His praise exalt, 
Till it arrive at heaven's vault ; 
Which then, perhaps, rebounding, may 
Echo beyond the Mexique bay ! " 

Thus sung they, in the English boat, 
A holy and a cheerful note ; 
And all the way, to guide their chime, 
With falling oars they kept the time. 



THE POETRY OF BUTLER AND DRYDEN. 301 

tbese are rare endowments. But his, though shedding many beau- 
tifal gleams of fancy, is no poetic vein that yields jewels of the first 
lustre. He has justly been described as having followed out, in the 
track of the ludicrous, the turn for strained analogies which had 
been indulged by Cowley and his predecessors in a serious direction. 
We read Butler to be amused ; and not seldom we are instructed 
also, and made to think curiously, if not always to profit. But 
such poets can never hold more than a low step, in the path which 
leads us upward towards the ethereal region of imagination : and 
the time must be a poor one which yields no brighter fruits than 
h. 1661. ) those we gather from such writings. Prior, whose time of 
(1.1721. y authorship went forward into the next generation, may be 
named, along with Butler, as showing, in his lighter pieces, wit of 
a much less manly kind. His serious poems are chiefly meritorious 
for their facility of phrase and melody. 

8. The life of Dryden is a scene on which we cannot look back 
without respectful sorrow. A man of very high endowments, both 
as a poet and as a thinker, condemned to labour for a corrupt 
generation, and yielding with melancholy consciousness to the 
temptations which beset him, receives from posterity hardly any 
higher fame than that of having improved our prose style and our 
versification. Indeed, most of his works in verse are perhaps 
classed too high, when they are called poems. They are, with few 
exceptions, rather essays or disquisitions, couched in fine and 
vigorous verse, and containing here and there passages of very 
great poetical beauty. The most vague description of his best 
works shows how utterly impossible it was, to construct poetry out 
of such materials. His "Annus Mirabilis," celebrating, with great 
animation, the memorable year 1666, is an effusion of historical 
panegyric. The " Absalom and Achitophel," versified with such ad- 
mirable spirit, and so astonishingly rich in poetical portraiture, is 
a satire on the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth and his adviser 
Shaftesbury. The " Hind and Panther," an allegory, ill sustained, 
but full both of poetical and satirical force, was an argument in verse 
to justify the writer's own recent change of religion. One of the 
pieces in which the poetic character is most thoroughly sustained, 
is the well-known ode on Alexander's Feast ; which yet is not con- 
ceived in a very pure or high tone of lyric inspiration. His fancy was 
often kindled to very happy flights, when he was occupied in re- 
casting and embellishing the thoughts of others. We thus find 
many of his finest images, with an ease of style such as he hardly 
reached elsewhere, in those modernizations of Boccaccio and Chau- 
cer, which he called his " Fables." Some of these contain very fine 



302 THE KESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

passages, both original and imitated; witli not a few symptoms, 
especially in his dealings with the Canterbury Tales, that betray a 
very imperfect sense of the merit of his model. His translation of 
the jEneid, as imperfect a picture of the original as Pope's of the 
Iliad, is indeed deficient in grace, but full of vigour ; and it equals 
any of his works as a specimen of the heroic couplet, a measure 
never so well written in our language, either before Dryden or 
since.* 

* JOHN DRYDEN. 

I. From the " Xnighfs Tale," modernized and altered from Chaucer. 

1. THE INTEOnDCTION TO THE TOURNAMENT. 

The day approached when Fortune should decide 
The important enterprise, and give the bride : 
For now the rivals round the world had sought, 
And each his number well-appointed brought. 
The nations far and near contend in choice, 
And send the flower of war by public voice.^ 
That, after or before, were never known 
Such chiefs, as each an army seemed alone. 
Beside the champions, all of high degree. 
Who knighthood loved and deeds of chivalry, 
Thronged to the lists, and envied to behold 
The names of others, not their own, enrolled. 
Nor seems it strange ; for every noble knight 
Who loves the fair, and is endued with might, 
In such a quarrel would be proud to fight. 
There breathes not scarce a man on British ground, 
(An isle for love and arms of old renowned,) 
But would have sold his life to purchase fame, 
To Palamon or Arcite sent his name ; 
And, had the land selected of the best. 
Half had come hence, and let the world provide the rest. 

2. THE DEATH OP ABCITE. 

— — " Have pity on the faithful Palamon ! " 

This was his last : for death came on amain, 
And exercised below his iron reign : 
Then upward to the seat of life he goes : 
Sense fled before him : what he touched he froze.: 
Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw, 
Though less and less of Emily he saw : 
So, speechless for a little while he lay ; 
Then grasped the hand h,e held, and sighed liis soul away. 

II, From " Theodore and Honoria," versified from Boccaccio's prose. 

THE APPARITION. 

While listening to the murmuring leaves he stood, 
More than a mile immersed within the wood, 



DRYDEN S POETRY. 303 

9. The poetical character of this illustrious but unfortunate man 
has been portrayed, with equal kindliness and justice, by one who 
himself founded a poetical school very unlike his. 

" The distinguishing characteristic of Dryden's genius seems to 

At once the wind was laid ; the whispering sound 
Was dumb ; a rising earthquake rock'd the ground : 
With deeper brown the grove was overspread ; 
A sudden horror seized his giddy head, 
And his ears tingled, and his colour fled. 
Nature was in alarm : some danger nigh 
Seem'd threaten 'd, though unseen to mortal eye. 
Unused to fear, he summon 'd all his soul, 
And stood collected in himself, and whole : 

Not long : for soon a whirlwind rose around. 
And from afar he heard a screaming sound, 
As of a dame distressed, who cried for aid. 
And fill'd with loud laments the secret shade. 

A thicket close beside the gTove there stood, 
With briars and brambles choked and dwai-fish wood : 
From thence the noise, which now approaching near, 
With more distinguished notes invades his ear. 
He raised his head, and saw a beauteous maid. 
With hair dishevelled, issuing through the shade : 
Two mastifis, gaunt and gTim, her flight pursued, 
And oft their fasten 'd fangs in blood imbrued : 
Oft they came up and pinch'd her tender side : 

^" Mercy, oh mercy, heaven ! " she ran, and cried. 

When heaven was named, they loosed their hold again .: 
Then sprung she forth : they followed her amain. 

ui. From '■'■Absalom and AchitojpheV^ 

CHAEACTEK OF ELKANAH SETTLE, A SMALL POET OP THE DAY. 

Doeg, though without knowing how or why. 

Made still a blundermg kind of melody; 

Spurred boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin, 

Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.: 

Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, 

And, in one word, heroically mad. 

He was too warm on picking-work to dwell. 

But fagoted his notions as they fell : 

And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. 

Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire ; 

For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature. 

He needs no more than birds or beasts to think : 

All his occasions are to eat and drink. 

If he call rogue and rascal from a garret. 

He means you no more mischief than a parrot : 

The words for friend and foe alike were made ; 

To fetter them in verse is all his trade. 



b04 THE RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION. 

have been the power of reasoning, and of expressing the result in 
appropriate language. This may seem slender praise : yet these 
were the talents that led Bacon into the recesses of philosophy, and 
conducted Newton to the cabinet of nature. The prose works of 
Dryden bear repeated evidence to his philosophical powers. * * 
The early habits of his education and poetical studies gave his 
researches somewhat too much of a metaphysical character ; and it 
was a consequence of his mental acuteness, that his dramatic per- 
sonages often philosophized or reasoned when they ought only to 
have felt. The more lofty, the fiercer, the more ambitious feelings, 
seem also to have been his favourite studies. * * Though his 
poetry, from the natm-e of his subjects, is in general rather ethic 
and didactic than narrative.; yet no sooner does he adopt the latter 
style of composition, than his figures and his landscapes are pre- 
sented to the mind with-the same vivacity as the flow of his reason- 
ing, or the acute metaphysical discrimination of his characters. 
* * The satirical powers of Dryden were of the highest order. 
He draws his arrow to the head, and dismisses it straight upon his 
object of aim. But, while he seized, and dwelt upon, and aggi-a- 
vated, all the evil features of his subject, he carefully retained just as 
much of its laudable traits, as preserved him from the charge of want 
of candour, and fixed down the resemblance upon the party. And 
thus, instead of unmeaning caricatures, he presents portraits which 
cannot be mistaken, however unfavourable ideas they may convey 
of the originals. The character of Shaftesbury, both as Achitophel, 
and as drawn in ' The Medal,' bears peculiar witness to this asser- 
tion. * * The ' Fables ' of Dryden are the best examples of 
his talents as a narrative poet ; those powers of composition, de- 
scription, and narration, which must have been called into exercise 
by the Epic Muse, had his fate allowed him to enlist among her 
votaries. The account of the procession of the fairy chivalry in 
the ' Flower and the Leaf;' the splendid description of the cham- 
pions who came to assist at the tom-nament in the ' Knight's Tale ; ' 
the account of the battle itself, its alternations and issue : if they 
cannot be called improvements on Chaucer, are nevertheless so 
spirited a transfusion of his ideas into modern verse, as almost to 
claim the merit of origmality. Many passages might be shown, in 
which this praise may be carried still higher, and the merit of 
invention added to that of imitation. Such is, in the ' luiight's 
Tale,' the description of the commencement of the tom-ney, which 
is almost entirely original ; and such are most of the ornaments in 
the translations from Boccaccio, whose prose fictions demanded 
more additions from the poet than the exuberant imagery of Chaucer. 



THE CHARACTER OF DRYDEn's GENIUS. 305 

To select mstances would be endless : but every reader of poetry 
has by heart the description of Iphigenia asleep : nor are the lines 
in ' Theodore and Honoria,' which describe the approach of the 
apparition, and its effects upon animated and inanimated nature, 
even before it becomes visible, less eminent for beauties of the 
terrific order."* 

* Sir Walter Scott : Life of Dryden. 



306 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



CHAPTER IX, 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

A. D. 1702— A. D. 1800. 

SECTION FIRST : THE LITERARY CHARACTER AND CHANGES 
OF THE PERIOD. 

1. Character of the Period as a Whole — Its Eelations to Our Ovm Time. — 
2. Literary Character of its First Greneration — The Age of Queen Aiuie 
and George I. — 3. Literary Character of its Second and Third Gener- 
ations — From the Accession of George II. — 4. The Prose Style of the 
First Generation — Addison — Swift. — 5. The Prose Style of the Second 
and Third Generations — Johnson. 

1. No period in our literary Hstory has been, at various times, 
estimated so variously as the Eighteenth Centmy. If it was over- 
valued by those who lived in it, it is assuredly undervalued in om* 
day ; a natural result of ckcumstances, but not the less a result 
to be regretted. In regard to ages more remote, the beautifying 
charm of antiquity tempts us to err, oftenest, by entertaining for 
their great men and great deeds, although the principles may be 
very unlike om^s, a respect exceeding that which is their due. But 
the century immediately preceding our own is not far enough dis- 
tant to be reverenced as ancient ; while its distance is sufficient to 
have caused, in the modes of thinkiug and varieties of taste, changes 
so material as to incapacitate us for sympathizing readily with its 
characteristics. 

It is true, no doubt, that in England, as elsewhere in Europe, the 
temper of the eighteenth century was cold, dissatisfied, and hyper- 
critical. Alike in the theory of literature and in that of society, 
in the theory of knowledge and in that of religion, old principles 
were peremptorily called in question ; and the literary man and the 
statesman, the philosopher and the theologian, ahke found the task 
allotted them to be mainly that of attack or defence. It is true, 
likewise, that the opinions which kept the firmest hold on the minds 



THE THREE STAGES. 307 

of the nation, and the sentiments which those opinions prompted, 
were quite alien to the speculative or the heroic ; and that they re- 
ceived adequate literary expression, in a pliilosophy which acknowl- 
edged no higher motive than utility, and in a kind of poetry which 
found its favourite field in didactic discussion, and sank in narrative 
into the comic and domestic. It is further true, (and it is a fact 
which had a very wide influence,) that, in all departments of literary 
composition, but most of all in poetry, the form had come to be 
more regarded than the matter ; that melody of rhythm, and ele- 
gance of phrase, and symmetry of parts, were held to be higher 
excellences than rich fancy or fervid emotion. 

Wliatever may be the amount of likeness or unlikeness which, 
as a whole, this description bears to the character of our own time, 
it is plain that there are points of dissimilarity, sufficient to make us 
look with indifference on many literary phenomena which were 
deeply interesting to those who first beheld them. It is certain, 
also, that an age like the eighteenth centm-y could not give birth to 
literatm-e possessing the loftiest and most striking qualities, either 
of poetry or of eloquence. But it was an age whose monuments 
we cannot overlook, without losing much instruction as well as 
much pleasure. It increased prodigiously the knowledge previously 
possessed by mankind, especially in those fields which lie furthest 
from that of literature : it swept away a vast number of wrong 
opinions by which aU preceding knowledge had been alloyed, and 
this in literature as well as m other walks of thought : it produced 
many literary works excellent both in matter and in expression, and 
especially excellent in those qualities which are chiefly wanting in 
the literature of our time ; and it exercised on the Enghsh language, 
partly for good and partly for evil, an influence which is shown in 
every sentence we now speak or write. 

2. The diversities which took place in the English Literature of 
the Eighteenth Centm-y, diversities m opinion, in sentunent, and 
in taste, diversities m matter and in style, may in a general way be 
understood sufficiently, if we regard the whole period as portioned 
ofi" into Three successive Stages, the average length of which wfll 
thus be about a generation in the life of man. 

The First Generation of the time was that which is currently 
named from Queen Anne, but which should be taken as including 
also the reign of her successor. Our notion of its literary character 
is chiefly derived from the poetry of Pope, and the prose of Addison 
and his friends. It was long regarded among us as worthy to be com- 
pared with the Augustan age in the literature of Eome ; and it was 
so compared by critics who intended thus to intimate its superiority, 



308 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

not only to all that had gone before, but to all that was likely to 
follow. There was really not a little likeness between the ancient 
age and the modern ; and the likeness prevails especially in the ten- 
dency to didactic coldness which pervaded the writings of both, and 
in the anxious attention paid to correctness of style and formal 
symmetry of method. But the works of Yirgil and his contem- 
poraries were not the noblest efforts of the Roman mind : still less 
could England, which had already given birth to Chaucer and 
Shakspeare, to Spenser and Milton, to the Old Divines and other 
masters of eloquence, be believed to have reached the culminating 
point of her poetry in Pope's satires and didactic verses, or that of 
her prose in the light elegancies of the Essayists. In philosoph- 
ical thinking itself, which is seldom taken into account in those 
popular estimates, Berkeley and Clarke, though we shall probably 
place them higher than Hobbes and Locke, will by few be estimated 
as standing above Bacon. 

In its own region, a region which is not low, though a good way 
below the highest, the lighter and more popular section in the 
literature of Queen Anne's time is distinguished and valuable. 
The readers it addressed were sought only in the upper ranks of 
society ; and the success which attended its teaching was equally 
honourable to the instructors and beneficial to the pupils. Its 
lessons were full of good sense and correct taste ; they insinuated as 
much information as an audience chiefly composed of fashionable or 
literary idlers could be expected to accept ; and, never affecting im- 
aginative or impassioned flights that were alike beyond the sphere of 
the teachers and that of the taught, they were generally pervaded by 
right and amiable feelings, and by well-directed though not widely- 
reaching sympathies. As literary artists, those writers attained an 
excellence as eminent as any that can be reached by art, when it is 
neither inspired by enthusiastic genius, nor employed on majestic 
themes ; but an excellence which, through the want of such inspira- 
tion and such topics, was of a negative rather than a positive cast. 
Subjecting themselves cordially to the laws of that French school 
of criticism, of which Dryden and his contemporaries had been in 
part disciples, they exhibited, perhaps more thoroughly than the 
literary men of Louis the Fourteenth's court, the results to which 
those laws tend : and their polish, and grace, and sensitive refine- 
ment of taste, were accompanied in not a few of them, and in some 
quite overpowered, by a national and masculine vigour, of which 
the French court-literature was altogether destitute. In its moral 
tone, again, the early part of the eighteenth century, actually much 
better than the age before it, communicated a better tone to its 



THE SECOND AND THIRD STAGES. 309 

literature. It is much purer, at least, if not always so lofty as we 
might wish to see it. 

3. The Second Generation of the century may be reckoned, loosely, 
as contained in the reign of George the Second. It was a time in- 
ferior to that of Queen Anne for care and skill in the details of lit- 
erary composition : but it was much more remarkable, in almost all 
departments of literature, for vigour of thinking, for variety and 
ingenuity in the treatment of themes, and for the exhibition, in not 
a few quarters, of genuine poetic fancy and susceptibility. The 
clearer accents in which poetry began to speak, awakened, doubt- 
less, no more than faint echoes ia the minds of the listeners : but 
the efforts of the seekers after truth, not being too ambitious for 
the temper of the time, were, on the whole, justly appreciated. 

Samuel Johnson, entering on his toils soon after the beginning of 
this period, had produced his principal works before its close ; 
although his influence, whether on thinking or on style, was not ma- 
tured till later. In singular contrast to his writings, stand those of 
the novelists : Kichardson alone having any thing in common with 
him ; while Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, are equally distant from the 
dignified pomp of his manner, and from the ascetic elevation of his 
morality. It deserves to be remembered, too, that a more solemn 
spirit was beguming to be prevalent in thinking ; and that, in the 
same generation with the looseness of the novels and the scepticism 
of Hume, the manly reasoning of Butler was employed in defence of 
sacred truth, and the stern dissent of Wesley and Whitefield was 
entered against religious deadness. Poetry began to stir with a new 
life. Johnson himself belonged essentially, in his versified compo- 
sitions, to the school of Pope ; but a nobler ambition animated 
Yomig and Akenside, and a finer poetic sense was perceptible in 
Thomson, Gray, and Collins. 

About the accession of George the Third, we may conveniently 
consider ourselves as entering on a new development of literary 
elements, and as approaching, with accelerated rapidity, the state 
of things which arose about the close of the century. 

This Thhd Generation of the eighteenth century was by no means 
so fertile in literary genius as either of the other two. But some 
of the men who were its sons were very richly gifted ; and the tone 
both of thinking and of feeling was such as we can readily sympa- 
thize with. The earliest of its remarkable writers were the historians, 
headed by Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon ; writers whose works, 
some of them defective as records of truth, have hardly ever been 
exceeded as literary compositions of their class. In philosophical 

They embraced 



310 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

ethics in Paley and Adam Smith ; the theory of public wealth in 
the great work of the latter of those two ; psychology and meta- 
physics in Eeid and the other founders of the Scottish school. 
Criticism, conducted by Johnson during his old age in the narrow 
spirit which he had learned in youth, was now called on to give ac- 
count of its principles ; and poetry began to traverse paths which she 
had long deserted, with some which she had never trodden before. In 
the roll of the poets who adorned those forty years, we read suc- 
cessively the names of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Bums. 

4. There is one feature of our literature on which the influence of 
the eighteenth century has been great and permanent, namely, the 
character of our Prose Style. In the course of that time, there were 
formed two dissimilar manners of writing, each of which has con- 
tributed towards the formation of all that is distiactive in our more 
modern forms of expression. The earlier of those manners we may 
understand by studymg the language of Addison, or stiU better by 
comparing his with that of Swift. The later of the two is instanced 
most distinctly in the language of Johnson ; if indeed we should not 
rather consider him as carrying its peculiarities to excess. 

In style, as m so much else, the writers of Queen Anne's time 
pursued the track of their predecessors, but cultivated successfully 
the ground on which the latter had done only the rough work of 
pioneers. Dryden and his followers had cleared away, almost en- 
th'ely, the quaintness and pedantry of the times preceding the Resto- 
ration, and had written with neatness or attained elegance whenever 
they wrote with care. But there was m all of them an inclination 
to looseness of structure and meanness of phrase, which, in the 
more hasty writers, degenerated, as it has aptly been said, into what 
we now call slang. 

Addison and his friends aimed assiduously at rising above this, 
yet without rising higher than the ordinary language of refined 
social life. Their great merit of style consisted in their correct 
knowledge and accurate reproduction of those genuine idiomatic 
peculiarities of our speech, which had been received into the con- 
versation of intelligent and instructed men. They wrote such 
English as an accomplished person of their day would naturally 
have spoken. This is true of all of them, though most emphatically 
so of Addison. It is true of Swift himself, whose worst coarse- 
ness of matter hardly ever betrays him into offensive coarseness of 
expression. Yet there are great diversities among them ; and these 
two leaders of the band furnish apt instances of the extremes : 
Addison being admu*able for ease and grace, but sometimes feeble 
through fastidiousness ; Swift bemg often clumsy, but always vigor- 



PROSE STYLE. 311 

ous and pointed, and presenting a greater stock of good and fami- 
liar words and idioms than any other writer of our language. 

It is instructive to remark, that the principles on which this style 
was constructed, exposed it to an imminent risk of contracting 
serious faults in the hands of writers not more than usually adroit. 
Seemingly easy, it was really very difficult. If the author dealt 
with familiar topics, or aimed at nothing more than a colloquial 
tone, he was liable to faU back into the old defects of vulgarism or 
irregular looseness ; faults to which the nature of the style directly 
disposed it, and from which the chief himself had not always been 
free. If, again, the kind of topic, or any other motive, tempted to- 
wards elevation of style, the adaptation of the familiar language to 
this new exigency w^as apt to cause a complete evaporation of that 
easy and unforced union of extreme clearness with sufficient strength, 
Avhich, almost everywhere, stamped so firmly the style of the skilful 
model. 

5. It was not to be expected that the colloquial elegance of Addi- 
son should be inherited by any successor, nor perhaps that the 
popularity of such a style should long survive the discredit thrown 
on it by a series of bad imitations. The case was, that, by the mid- 
dle of the century, the new style, of which Johnson became the 
characteristic example, was both the most common and the most 
admired. 

His wi'itings, indeed, gave to his style, during his old age and 
after his death, a fame which made it ridiculous through the unde- 
signed caricatures perpetrated by his copyists. But the features 
imitated by such writers are, in many points, merely the accidental 
characteristics produced by Johnson's own manner of thinking ; 
and we must not be tempted by them, either to misapprehend what 
was the real character of the style, or to believe that he or any one 
person whatever was the sole parent of it. 

It deviated from the style of the age before it, both in idiom and 
in vocabulary. 

In Idiom, its tendency was, to abandon the famiUar and native 
characteristics of the Saxon part of our language, and to fall 
into those expressions and modes of arrangement, which may be 
said to be common to all the modern European tongues and partic- 
ularly inherent in none. In Addison's Spectator there are sen- 
tences and phrases innumerable, which we could not possibly trans-' 
late, with literal faithfulness, into any other language of Europe : 
in Johnson's Rambler there is hardly perhaps a clause or a sentence 
but could be transferred, by close rendering, to the French or 
Italian, the modem tongues whose idiomatic structure is fartheet 



312 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

distant from that of the English. The change in idiom thus described 
can hardly be attributed at all to any special influence exercised by 
Johnson. It is also to be remembered that it has had, on the speech 
of more recent times, an effect much wider and more permanent 
than the other class of changes. 

In the changes on the Vocabulary, Johnson's writings operated 
much more actively ; although here, also, all that he did was to accel- 
erate the working of a tendency already existing, and closely allied 
to that which caused the idiomatic transformations. By others as 
well as by him, though by none so much, large use was made of 
words derived from the Latin. A very considerable proportion of 
such words had been formed by the writers who belonged to the 
first half of the seventeenth century, but were become obsolete in 
the course of the hundred years that had since elapsed. All that 
Johnson and his contemporaries did as to these, was to revive the 
use of them, and thus, in a certain degree, to throw our diction 
back on its older character. A good many others were new in the 
tongue ; but those of this group were by no means so numerous as 
they have sometimes been believed to be. The new importations 
and the restorations of the old were alike prompted by various 
motives. A few of these terms may really have been required, for 
the expression of new facts. But, in a large majority of cases, there 
were already words denoting the same ideas ; and what was gained 
was not so much as increase of precision, but only, in addition to 
the effect of novelty, greater impressiveness and pomp. These at- 
tributes of style were held valuable, when language was beginning 
to be wanting in grace and nature, and needed other qualities to 
make up for the loss. 



THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 313 



CHAPTER X. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION SECOND : THE LITERATURE OF THE FIRST GENERATION. 

A. D. 1702— A. D. 1727. 

Anne, 1702-1714. 

George L, 17U-1727. 

Poetry. 1. The Drama — Non-Dramatic Poetry — Its Artificial Character 
— Minor Poets. — 2. Alexander Pope — Characteristics of his Genius and 
Poetry. — 3. Pope's Works — His Early Poems — Poems of Middle Age — 
His Later Poems. — Prose. 4. Theologians — Philosophers — Clarke's Nat- 
ural Theology — Bishop Berkeley's Idealism — Shaftesbury — Bolinghroke. 
— 5. Miscellaneous Prose — Occasional Writings — Defoe and Robinson 
Crusoe — Swift's Works and Literary Character — Other Prose Satires. — 
6. The Periodical Essayists — Addison and Steele — The Spectator — Its 
Character — Its Design. 

POETICAL LITERATURE. 

1. In our study of tlie Poetry of Queen Anne's time, the Drama 
scarcely deserves more than a parenthesis. The one pleasant point 
about it is the improvement in morals, which was shown by the 
Comedies, although accompanied by great want of delicacy both in 
manners and in language. That the ethical tone was high, how- 
ever, cannot be asserted of a time, in which the most famous works 
of the kind were Gay's equivocal " Beggar's Opera," and the 
" Careless Husband" of Gibber. Nor are these, or any other comic 
dramas of that day, comparable in ability to those of the best writers 
of the age immediately before them. In Tragedy, the first notice- 
able fact was, the appearance of Rowe's " Fair Penitent," which 
has already been noticed as an impudent but clever plagiarism from 
Massinger. In Addison's celebrated " Cato," the strict rules of 
the French stage became triumphant, and co-operated with the 
natural coldness of the author, in producing a series of stately and 
impressive speeches hardly in any sense deserving to be caUed 
dramatic. Young's " Revenge" had much more of tragic passion ; 
though it wanted almost entirely tliat force of characterization, which 

o 



314 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

seemed to have been buried with the old dramatists, and which had 
not even in them been the strongest point. 

"Wlien we turn from the Drama, we find some Minor Poets, who 
should not be altogether overlooked. Such were Gay, whose name is 
preserved by his " Fables," cheerful pieces of no great moment ; and 
Somerville, whose blank- verse poem, " The Chase," is not quite for- 
gotten. Swift's octosyllabic satu-es and occasional pieces, as excel- 
lent as his prose writings for their diction, are quite guiltless of the 
essence of poetry. 

The Heroic Measure of our poetic language, written by Dryden 
ruggedly and u^regularly, but with a noble roundness and variety of 
modulation, was now treated in another fashion, which continued to 
prevail throughout the greater part of the centmy. Two qualities 
were chiefly aimed at ; smoothness of melody, and brief pointedness 
of expression. The master in this school was Pope, whose versifica- 
tion has been described by a more recent poet, fairly on the whole, 
though with somewhat of the affection of a disciple. " That his 
rhythm and manner are the very best in the whole range of our 
poetry, need not be asserted. He has a gracefully peculiar manner ; 
though it is not calculated to be an universal one : and where indeed 
shall we find the style of poetry, that could be pronounced an ex- 
clusive model for every composer ? His pauses have little variety ; 
and his phrases are too much weighed in the balance of antithesis. 
But let us look to the spuit that pomts his antitheses, and to the 
rapid precision of his thoughts ; and we shall forgive him for bemg 
too antithetic and sententious." * 

The same turn, with less both of poetry and of terseness, is shown 
by other poets, some of whom began to T\Tite before Pope. Of 
these, Parnell comes nearest to him in manner ; Ambrose Phillips 
was a particularly pleasing versifier ; and Addison's best poem, the 
Letter from Italy, catches, from the fascinatmg theme, more warmth 
of feeling than its author has elsewhere shown in verse. Within 
this period fall the later works of Su* Eichard Blackmore ; who, al- 
though his poetic feebleness, as well as his heaviness of thought and 
language, made him a tempting butt for the witty men of his time, 
deserves remembrance on other grounds. Amidst the licence which 
followed the Kestoration, he had vindicated the cause of goodness 
by the example which all his writings fm-nished : in a time when 
poetry was hardly ever narrative, he ventm-ed to compose regular 
epics : and in his didactic poems he rose above the trivialities that 
were universally popular, and, as in his " Creation," touched the 
highest religious topics. 

* Campbell : Specimens of the British Poets. 



THE POETRY OF POPE. 315 

2. It has gravely been asked whether Pope was a poet. They 
h. 1688. 1 who put the question, expecting to compel an answer in 
d. 1744. j ^i^Q negative, must have fallen into some confusion in 
their use of words. But, if they ask, with a similar design, whe- 
ther he was a great poet, or a poet of the first order, we shall tell 
the truth in answering them as they wish. We might perhaps say, 
further, that the works which he has given us do not possess 
nearly all the value, which his fine genius might have imparted to 
them. 

There abound, in his poems, passages beautifully poetical; passages 
which convey to us, on the wings of the sweetest verse, exquisite 
thoughts, or dazzling images, or feelings delicately pleasing. Still 
more frequent are vigorous portraits of character, and sketches of 
social oddities, and evidences, widely various, of shrewd observation 
and reflective good-sense. The diction, almost every^vhere, is as 
highly finished as the versification. Further, if we turn from the 
details of a work to its aspect as a whole, we can hardly ever fail 
to admire the care and skill with which the parts are disposed and 
united. 

Amidst all these excellences, we want, or find but seldom, those 
others, in virtue of which poetry holds her prerogative as the soother 
and elevator of the human soul. Those few works of his which com- 
mmiicate to us, with unity and sequence, the characteristic pleasure 
of poetic art, yet, (it cannot but be allowed,) raise that pleasure 
from excitants of the least dignified kind that can excite it at all. 
We are wafted into no bright world of imagination, rapt into no 
dream of strong passion, seldom raised into any high region of 
moral thought. If emotion is shown by the poet or his personages, 
it is slight ; if fancy is excited, it is avowedly but in sport. Often- 
est, however, it is only by fits and stai'ts that we are at all tempted 
towards a poetical mood. The passages which make the poetry, are 
but occasional intervals of diversion from trains of observation or 
strokes of satire. If the words here used resemble those which 
occurred to us when we glanced at the works of Dryden, it is 
because a strong likeness prevails between the things described. 

For this continual alloy of Pope's poetry by non-poetical in- 
gredients, several reasons may be assigned, all of them common 
to him with the other poets of his day. In the fii'st place, they 
were agreed in setting a higher value on skill of execution, than on 
originality or vigour of conception. He himself prized his lively 
fancy and fine susceptibility much less than his delicacy of phrase 
and his melodious versification. Secondly, those poets abstained 
systematically from aU attempts at exciting strongly either imagina- 



316 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

tion or feeling. No group of writers, calling themselves poets, could 
have shunned more anxiously the heroic and the tragic. It has been 
said that Pope never tried to be pathetic except twice ; and this is 
scarcely an unfair description of his tone of sentiment. All the 
poetry of his school was carefuUy prepared for a refined and some- 
what finical class of readers, who shrunk from the idea of being 
called on to fancy any scenes, more stormy than those of their own 
level and easy life. Thirdly, there was also, arising in part out of 
this disinclination to passionate excitement, a constant tendency to 
make poetry lose that representative character in wliich it appeals 
directly to the imagination, and to force it on assuming avowedly 
and principally the function of communicating knowledge. This 
tendency moulded the whole form of almost every work then written 
in verse. Satires on men or opinions, ethical treatises, or discus- 
sions on questions affecting the theory of literature, were written 
in good verse, and with much prosaic good sense ; and a few pas- 
sages of an imaginative or sentimental cast, often truly and intensely 
poetical, were thrown in here and there, figuring as ornaments, 
rather than as essential parts of the design. 

3. The reflectiveness and polish of Pope's poetry might have led 
us to suppose, that his genius, like that of Dryden, must have come 
slowly to maturity. But this was not the case. His life, indeed, 
was a short one, and full of bodily suffering: and all his best works 
were written before he was forty years old. 

Nor do they give evidence of decided progi-ess in any of the qual- 
ifications of the poet, unless those minor ones which cannot but 
be improved by practice. The " Pastorals," the earliest of them, 
are merely boyish imitations : and in the " Windsor Forest," like- 
wise in great part an effusion of early youth, he evidently feels but 
little at home among the landscapes of the fields and woodlands, 
scarcely becoming poetical till he turns away to contemplate his- 
torical events. The taste, both of the poet and of the times, is yet 
more clearly shown in his " Essay on Criticism," published before 
he had attained his twenty-first year. It is very instructive to 
observe, that the topic of this poem was chosen, not by a man of 
mature years and trained reflection, but by an ambitious boy who 
had not yet emerged from his teens. Nor is the execution less 
ripe than the design. None of his works unites, more happily, 
regularity of plan, shrewdness of thought, and beauty of verse. 

To these excellences were added the richest stores of his fancy, 
in that which is certainly his most successful effort, " The Rape of 
the Lock." This exquisite work of art assumed its complete shape 
in the author's twenty-sixth year. It is the best of all mock-heroic 



THE POETRY OF POPE. 317 

poems, and incomparably beyond those of Tassoni and Boileau, its 
Italian and French models. The sharpest wit, the keenest dissection 
of the follies of fashionable life, the finest grace of diction, and the 
softest flow of melody, come appropriately to adorn a tale in which 
we learn how a fine gentleman stole a lock of a lady's hair. And 
the gay mockery of human life and action is interwoven, in the fan- 
tastic freaks of the benignant sylphs and malevolent gnomes, with 
a parody, not less pleasant, of the snpernatm'al mventions by which 
serious poetry has been wont to attempt the elevating of reahty 
into the sphere of the ideal. 

In the " Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and the " Elegy on an 
Unfortunate Lady," Pope attempted the pathetic, not altogether 
in vain, reaching in some passages a wonderful depth of emotion ; 
and " The Messiah," smooth and higlily elaborated, is agreeable as 
showing that the kindly and generous feeling which his other poems 
had often betrayed, was not unattended by more sacred thoughts 
and aspirations. 

The last achievement of those, the poet's best years, was his 
Translation of Homer. The Iliad was entirely his own : of the 
Odyssey he translated only a half; the remainder being performed 
by Fenton and Broome, small poets of the day. Elegant, pointed, 
and musical ; unfaithful to many of the most poetical passages of 
the original ; and misrepresenting still more the natural and simple 
majesty of manner which the ancient poet never lost : the Iliad of 
Pope assuredly did not merit the extravagant admhation which it 
generally received in his own day. Yet, if we could forget Homer, 
we might not unreasonably be proud of it. It is an excellent poem, 
one of the best in the Enghsh language. 

Among the poet's later works, were his Satires and Epistles; 
which are imitations and alterations of Horace, and extremely good 
in the Horatian fashion. In the " Dunciad," he threw away an 
infinity of invention and wit, and showed a discreditable bitterness 
of temper, in satirizing obscure writers, who would have been for- 
gotten but for his naming of them, and whose weak points he was 
too angry to discern clearly. Indeed it is a curious fact in the 
history of this smgular work, that, on being re-cast, it changed the 
name of its hero without changing anything material in the descrip- 
tion of him. Theobald, a dull man, with a good deal of antiquarian 
knowledge, who had offended Pope by publishing a better edition 
of Shakspeare than his own, was displaced to make room for Gibber, 
the airy fop of coffee-houses and theatrical green-rooms. Yet, if 
satire were the highest kind of poetry, it is questionable whether 
the Dunciad, with all its faults, would not entitle Pope to be called 



318 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

the greatest of poets. Amidst all other occupations, however, the 
most remarkable production of those declining years was the "Essay 
on Man," a work which contains much of exquisite poetry and finely 
solenm thought ; but which, designedly didactic, cannot but be cen- 
sured as conveying false instruction, because failing to communi- 
cate the highest portion of the truth. It seeks to reconcile, on the 
principles of human reason, those anomalies and contradictions of 
mortal life, for which no just solution can be found unless that 
which is revealed by the religion of Christianity. 

The " Essay on Man " abounds, more than any other of Pope's 
compositions, in those striking passages, which, by their mingled 
felicities of fancy, good-sense, and music, and (above all) by their 
extraordinary terseness of diction, have gained a place in the memory 
of every one. No writer of our tongue, except Shakspeare alone, 
has furnished so many such. They guarantee his immortality so 
securely, and are almost always so exquisite, that one cannot with- 
out reluctance acquiesce in those objections to the artificial scope 
of his poetry in the mass, which a just sense of the fimctions of the 
art compels us to entertain as unanswerable.* 

* ALEXANDER POPE. 
I. FROM "WINDSOR FOREST." 

The groves of Eden, vanisli'd now so long, 
Live in description, and look green in song. 
These, were my breast inspired with equal flame, 
Like them in beauty, should be like in fame. 

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain, 
Here earth and water seem to strive again ; 
Not chaos-like together crush 'd and bruised. 
But, as the world, harmoniously confused ; 
"Where order in variety we see, 
And where, though all things differ, all agree. 
' Here waving groves a chequer'd scene display, 
And part admit and part exclude the day : 
There, interspersed in lawns and opening glades, 
Thin trees arise that shmi each other's shades. 
Here in full light the russet plains extend ; 
There, wrapp'd in clouds, the blueish hills ascend. 
Even the wild heath displays her purple dies ; 
And 'midst the desert fruitful fields arise, 
That, crown 'd with tufted trees and springing corn, 
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn. 

n. FROM "the rape of the lock." 

Description of Belinda, the Heroine. 
Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain, 
The sun first rises o'er the purpled main, 



THE POETRY OF POPE. 319 



PROSE LITERATURE. 



4, Of the Theological Writings of Queen Anne's time, there are 
few on which we are tempted to linger. Bishop Atterbury's con- 
troversial eloquence is forgotten ; while, without eloquence, and 

Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams 

Launch 'd on the bosom of the silver Thames. 

Fair nymphs and well-dress'd youths around her shone; 

But every eye was fix'd on her alone. 

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, 

Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore. 

Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose, 

Quick as her eyes, and as unfix 'd as those : 

Favours to none, to all she smiles extends : 

Oft she rejects, but never once offends. 

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike ; 

And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. 

Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride. 

Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide. 

If to her share some female errors fall. 

Look on her face, and you'll forget them all. 

m. FROM THE " ELEGY OK AN UNFORTUNATE LADY." 

"What beck'niQg ghost, along the moonlight shade, 
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade ? 
'Tis she ! — But why that bleeding bosom gored ? 
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword ? 
Oh, ever beauteous, ever friendly ! tell, 
Is it, in heaven, a crime to love too well ? 
To bear too tender or too firm a heart ? 
To act a Eoman's or a lover's part ? 
Is there no bright reversion in the sky. 
For those who gi-eatly think or bravely die? 
* * * * 

So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name. 
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. 
How loved, how honour'd once, avails thee not ; 
To whom related, or by whom begot : 
A heap of dust alone remains of thee : 
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be ! 

Poets themselves must fall, like those they simg 
Deaf the praised ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. 
Even he, whose soul now melts in moui-nful lays, 
Shall shortly want the generous tear he pays. 
Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part. 
And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart ; 
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er. 
The muse forgot, and thou beloved no more ! 



320 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

with no distinguished power of thought, a devout spu-it and doc- 
trinal accuracy have preserved the works of Matthew Henry. 
Laymen furnished some rehgious works, such as Addison's treatise 
On the Evidences of Christianity, a kind of writings required 
as an antidote to others of evil tendency. The deepest thinker 
h. 1675. "I of the day on such questions was Samuel Clarke, a singu- 
cf. 1729.]' larly acute metaphysician, whose argument to prove a 
priori the existence of the Supreme Being introduces us to the 
Philosophical Writings of that argumentative generation. None of 
these holds so prominent a place in the history of philosophy 
h. 1684.1 ^^ ^^® speculations of Bishop Berkeley, a writer whose 
d. 1753. ]■ style has a quiet refinement that is exceedingly delightful ; 
while his subtlety of thought has very seldom been equalled. The 
philosophical Idealism of this pious and philanthropic man exer- 
cised, afterwards, much influence on the course of metaphysical in- 
quiry ; and, in several quarters, as in his " Theory of Vision," he 
has given us masterpieces of psychological analysis. Lord Shaftes- 
bury's briliiant but indistinct treatises have similarly been the germ 
of not a few discussions in ethics. His style exhibits a mixture, 

TV. FROM "the DUNCIAD." 

PaH oftlie Hero's Invocation to Ms Guardian Spirit. 
Then he : G-reat Tamer of all human art ! 
First in my care, and ever at my heart ! 
Dulness ! whose good old cause I yet defend ; 
With whom my Muse began, with whom shall end ! 
Oh thou ! of business the directing soul. 
To this our head like bias to the bowl. 
Which, as more ponderous, made its aim more true. 
Obliquely waddling to the mark in view ; 
Oh ! ever gracious to perplex'd mankind. 
Still spread a healing mist before the mind I 
And, lest we err by wit's wild dancing light, 
Secure us kindly in our native Night : 
Or, if to wit a coxcomb make pretence, 
Guard the sure barrier between that and sense ; 
Or quite unravel all the reasoning thread. 
And hang some curious cobweb in its stead ! 

As, forced from wind-guns, lead itself can fly, 
And ponderous slugs cut swiftly through the sky ; 
As clocks to weight their nimble motion owe. 
The wheels above urged by the load below ; 
Me emptiness and dulness could inspire, 
And were my elasticity and fire. 

Some demon stole my pen, (forgive the offence !) 
And once betrayed me into common sense : 
Else all my prose and verse were much the same :, 
This prose on stilts ; that, poetry falFn lame. 



DEFOE AND SWIFT. 321 

very odd thougli very natural, of refined and pleasing animation with 
affected novelties and other whimsicalities of diction. Lord Boling- 
broke, once famous as a writer, is now justly forgotten, unless for 
having taught Pope some of the errors that deform his " Essay on 
Man." He ^vi-ote with great liveliness, and with equal shallowness 
of thought and of knowledge. His political speculations are admit- 
tedly no better than they might have been expected to be from the 
inconsistent course of his public life : and his attacks on religion 
are among the feeblest that have ever been directed against it. 

5. But we are more accustomed to judge of the Prose Literature 
of that time by works of a more popular cast, some of them indeed 
being in their design merely things of their day, which are remem- 
bered through their force of language or ingenuity of invention. 
h. 1661. 7 Daniel Defoe is the first person who, in our literary history, 
d. 1731.]" deserves to be named as a good newspaper- writer. Some 
of the undertakings of his busy, contentious, and unfortunate life 
were of this sort : he wrote also a large number of political pamph- 
lets : but he is now remembered only, and is not likely soon to be 
forgotten, on account of one of his many Novels. Every one feels 
the unostentatious aptness of invention, the practical good-sense, 
and the chcumstantial plainness making everything so plausible, 
which are characteristics of " Robmson Crusoe." The strong ap- 
pearance of reality is nowhere better produced than in some pieces 
where he professes to be relating historical facts ; as in his " Memoirs 
of a Cavalier." Similar merits abound so much in his other fictions, 
that one cannot but regret his constant selection of vicious char- 
acters and lawless adventures as the objects of his descriptions. 
He is very far from being an immoral writer : but most of his scenes 
are such as we cannot be benefited by contemplating. Were it not 
for this serious drawback, several of his stories, depicting ordinary 
life with extraordinary vigour and originality, and inspired by a 
never-failing sympathy for the interests and feelings of the mass of 
the people, might deserve higher honour than the writings of his 
more refined and dignified contemporaries. Nor is the author's 
idiomatic English style the smallest of his merits. 
i>. 1667. ) Among Swift's prose writings, there is none that is not a 
'^•1744. 1 masterpiece of bare, strong, Saxon English; and there is 
none, perhaps, that is quite destitute either of his keen wit or of his 
ferocious ill-nature. He, one of our shrewdest observers and best 
writers, possesses a celebrity which can never be entirely extin- 
guished ; but which, through his moral perversities, is not much 
more enviable than the notoriety a man would obtain by being ex- 
posed on the pUlory. His works which are still read are a strange 

02 



322 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

kind of Satirical Eomances. These are most pungent, doubtless, 
when, as in Gulliver's Travels, human nature is his victim : but he 
makes them hardly less amusing when he ridicules forgotten literary 
controversies in the Battle of the Books, commemorating the dispute 
in which we saw Temple taking part ; when he treats church-dis- 
putes, in the Tale of a Tub, in a manner noway clerical ; or when 
he jeers at Burnet, a shrewd and useful historian, in the Memoks of 
P. P. Clerk of the Parish. His style deserves so much attention 
from the student, that it must here be very fully exemplified. Nor 
can its character be thoroughly understood unless we scrutinize it 
in its most familiar shape, as well as in the form it wears in his 
more elaborate compositions.* 

* JONATHAN SWIFT. 
I. From the Dedication of'"'- A Tale of a Tub.''^ 
[The Satire, written about 1700, is dedicated to Posterity, figured as a 
Prince not come to years of discretion. His Governor or Tutor is Time, 
who will teach him what to think of authors and their works. Besides 
making half-sneering allusions to the greatest poet and the greatest scholar 
of the day, the satirist describes, with an irony not to be mistaken by any 
one, some of the small writers who have not found a place in our text. Yet 
fame has its kinds as well as its degrees. Rymer, a bad poet and worse 
critic, is respected by historical students as the editor of the " Foedera :" 
and the metrical version of the Psalms has made the name of Tate famil- 
iar to many thousands of persons, who never heard of Dean Swift.] 

Sir, I here present your Highness with the fruits of a very few leisure 
hours, stolen from the short intervals of a world of business, and of an em- 
ployment quite alien from such amusements as this ; the poor production of 
that refuse of time which has lain heavy upon my hands, during a long pro- 
rogation of parliament, a great dearth of foreign news, and a tedious fit of 
rainy weather. For which and other reasons it cannot choose extremely to 
deserve such a patronage as that of your Highness, whose numberless vir- 
tues, in so few years, make the world look upon you as the future example 
to all princes. For, although your Highness is hardly got clear of infancy, 
yet has the universal learned world already resolved upon appealing to your 
future dictates with the lowest and most resigned submission ; fate having 
decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit, in this polite and 
most accomplished age. Methinks the number of appellants were enough 
to shock and startle any judge, of a genius less unlimited than yours. But, 
in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to whose care 
the education of your Highness is committed, has resolved, I am told, to 
keep you in almost an universal ignorance of our studies, which it is your 
inherent birthright to inspect. 

It is amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the face of 
the sun, to go about persuading your Highness, that our age is almost wholly 
illiterate, and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know 
very well, that, when your Highness shall come to riper years and have 
gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect 



swift's satires. 323 

None of the serious writings of the generation contains so much 
of really good criticism, as the burlesque Memoirs of Martinus 

inquiring into the authors of the very age before you. And to think that 
this Insolent, in the account he is preparing for your view, designs to reduce 
them to a number so insignificant as I am ashamed to mention : it moves my 
zeal and my spleen for the honour and interest of our vast flourishing body, 
as well as of myself, for whom I know by long experience he has professed 
and still continues a peculiar malice. 

It is not unlikely, that, when your Highness will one day peruse what I 
am now writing, you may be ready to expostulate with your Governor upon 
the credit of what I here affirm, and command him to show you some of our 
productions. To which he will answer, (for I am well informed of his de- 
signs,) by asking your Highness, "Where they are?" and, "What is become 
of them ?" and pretend it a demonstration that there never were any, because 
they are not then to be found. Not to be found ! Who has mislaid them ? 
* * * It were endless to recount the several methods of tyi-anny and 
destruction which your governor is pleased to practise on this occasion. His 
inveterate malice is such to the writings of our age, that, of several thou- 
sands produced yearly from this reno-\vned city, before the next revolution 
of the sun there is not one to be heard of: unhappy infants ! many of them 
barbarously destroyed before they have so much as learned their mother- 
tongue to beg for pity i * * * 

The concern I liave most at heart, is for our corporation of poets ; from 
whom I am preparing a petition to your Highness, to be subscribed with the 
names of one hundred and thirty-six of the first-rate ; but whose immortal 
productions are never likely to reach your eyes, though each of them is now 
a humble and earnest appellant for the laurel, and has large comely volumes 
ready to show for a support to his pretensions. The never-dying works of 
these illustrious persons, your governor. Sir, has devoted to unavoidable 
death; and your Highness is to be made believe, that our age has never 
arrived at the honour to produce one single poet. 

We confess Immortality to be a great and powerful goddess : but in vain 
we offer up to her our devotions and our sacrifices, if your Highness 's gov- 
ernor, who has usurped the priesthood, must, by an unparalleled ambition 
and avarice, wholly intercept and devour them. 

****** 

I profess to your Highness, in the integrity of my heart, that what I am 
going to say is literally true this minute I am writing. What revolutions 
may happen before it shall be ready for your perusal, I can by no means 
warrant : however, I beg you to accept it, as a specimen of our learning, our 
politeness, and our wit. I do therefore affirm, upon the word of a sincere 
man, that there is now actually in being a certain poet called John Dryden, 
whose translation of Virgil was lately printed in a large folio, well bound, 
and, if diligent search were made, for aught I know, is yet to be seen. 
There is another, called Nahum Tate, who is ready to make oath that he 
has caused many reams of verse to be published, whereof both himself and his 
bookseller (if lawfully required) can still produce authentic copies ; and there- 
fore wonders, why the world is pleased to make such a secret of it. There 
is a third, known by the name of Tom D'Urfey, a poet of a vast comprehen- 
sion, and universal genius, and most profound learning. There are also one 



324 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

Scriblerus, with its appendixes : the work is also abundant in the 
most biting strokes of wit. The authorship of it was shared, in 
proportions now uncertain, between Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot. 
The last of these was a Scotsman, who practised physic in London. 
He is supposed to have been the sole author of the whimsical na- 
tional satire called The History of John Bull, the best thing, taken 
as a whole, which the day produced in that class. The Letters of 
Lady Mary Wortley Montague claim merely a passing notice. 

6. Of all the popular writers, however, that adorned the reigns of 
Queen Anne and her successor, those whose influence, both on their 
own age and on posterity, has been at once greatest and most salu- 
tary, are the Essayists. Among these, Joseph Addison and Richard 
Steele were so pre-eminently distinguished, that no injustice would 
be done were we to forget their occasional assistants, such as Bud- 
gell, Tickell, Hughes, and Eusden, 

The Tatler, begun in Ireland by Steele, (aided at first by Swift. 
and afterwards by Addison,) was continued, three times a-week, 
from April 1709, to January 1711. The Spectator, in which Ad- 
dison speedily took the lead, commenced in March 1711, and was 
stopped after having gone on every week-day tiU December 1712. 

Mr Kjmer, and one Mr Dennis, most profound critics. There is a person 
styled Doctor Bentley, who has written nearly a thousand pages of immense 
erudition, giving a full and true account of a certain squahhle, of wonderful 
importance, between himself and a bookseller. 

n. A Letter. 

Sir, You stole in and out of town without seeing either the ladies or me ; 
which was very imgratefully done, considering the obligations you have to 
us for lodging and dieting with you so long. Why did you not call in a 
morning at the Deanery ? Besides, we reckon for certain that you came to 
stay a month or two, as you told us you intended. I hear you were so kind 
as to be at Laracor, where I hope you planted something : and I intend to 
be down after Christmas, where you must continue a week. As for your 
plan, it is very pretty, too pretty for the use I intend to make of Laracor. 
All I would desire is, what I mention in the paper I left you, except a walk 
down to the canal. I suppose your project would cost me ten pounds and a 
constant gardener. Pray come to town, and stay some time, and repay your- 
self some of your dinners. I wonder how a mischief you came to miss us. 
Why did you not set out a Monday, like a true country parson ? Besides, 
you lay a load on us, in saying one chief end of your journey was to see us : 
but I suppose there might be another motive, and you are like the man that 
died of love and the cholic. Let us know whether you are more or less 
monkish, how long you found yourself better by our company, and how long 
before you recovered the charges we put you to. The ladies assure you of 
their hearty services ; and I am, with great truth and sincerity, Your most 
faithful humble servant, J. Swift. 



THE PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS. 325 

The Gruardian, becoming political, lived only through a part of the 
next year ; and, in the last six months of 1714, papers published three 
times a-week made up the eighth and last volume of the Spectator, 
5. 1676. 7 Steele, an kregular thinker as well as an irregular liver, 
d. 1729.J has had his merits, especially in the Spectator, somewhat 
unfairly over-clouded by the fame of his coadjutor. Much in- 
ferior ui style, in refinement both of sentiment and of reflection, 
and in the higher kinds of information, he yet knew both mankind 
and the world, and had a dramatic force, as well as an originality 
of humour, by which the series of papers has profited largely. In 
not a few instances, such as the description of the Spectator's Club, 
we can trace to him the invention of striking outlines, which his 
friend afterwards fiilled up, imparting to them a new charm by his 
o-wn characteristic gTacefulness of colouring and placid cheerfulness 
of feeling * 

The extraordinary popularity of those periodicals, especially the 
Spectator, was creditable to the reading persons of the community, 

* SIR RICHARD STEELE. 
From tlie Description of the Spectator's Club : in No. 2. 
The first of our society is a gentleman of "Worcestershire, of an ancient 
descent, a baronet, his name Sir Eoger De Coverley. His great grand- 
father was inventor of that famous country dance which is called after him. 
All who know that shire, are very well acquainted with the parts and merits 
of Sir Eoger. He is a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour : 
but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to 
the manners of the world, only as he thinks the world is in the wrong. 
However, this humom- creates him no enemies ; for he does nothing with 
sourness or obstinacy : and his being unconfined to modes and forms, maizes 
him but the readier and more capable to please and oblige all who know him. 
It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a 
perverse beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before that disappoint- 
ment Sir Eoger was what you call a fine gentleman. But, being ill-used by 
the widow, he was very serious for a year and a half : and though, his tem- 
per being naturally jovial, he at last got over it, he grew careless of himself, 
and never dressed afterwards. He continues to wear a coat and doublet of 
the same cut that were in fashion at the time of his repulse ; which, in his 
merry humom's he tells us, has been in and out twelve times since he first 
wore it. He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty : keeps 
a good house both in town and country ; agTeat lover of mankind : but there 
is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather beloved than 
esteemed. His tenants grow rich ; his servants look satisfied ; all the young 
women profess love to him ; and all the young men are glad of his company. 
When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their names, and talks 
all the way up stairs to a visit. I must not omit, that Sir Eoger is a justice 
of the quorum ; that he fills the chair at a quarter-session with great abili- 
ties, and three months ago gained universal applause by explaining a pas- 
sage ia the gama act. 



326 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

then very much fewer than now. But it was a tribute to extraor- 
dinary merit, and to a soundness of judgment which appreciated cor- 
rectly, how far, and by what means, the attempt to elevate and purify 
the public taste and sentiment could safely be ventured on. The 
idea of the proj ectors was that of adopting the form of those flying 
sheets, which had hitherto been hardly ever anything better than 
indifferent little newspapers ; of discarding from their pages all that 
could nourish party-spirit, or provoke party-prejudice ; of making 
them the vehicle of judicious teachmg in morals, manners, and liter- 
ary criticism ; and of paying homage, now and then, to truths yet 
more sacred. 

If the design was not quite that of founding a literatm-e for the 
people, it combined at least the two aims, of -vsadening the circle of 
persons who might be made to take an interest in literary affairs, and 
of raising the standard both of thinking and of taste for those who 
had already acquired the habit of reading. To the mere literary 
lounger, their comic sketches of society, their whimsical autobio- 
graphies, thek exposures of social weaknesses and follies, in petitions, 
letters, or skilful allegories, offered themselves as supplying the place 
of the worn-out comic stage, and as supplying that place not only 
purely but instructively. It might indeed be said, with yet greater 
aptness, that the Spectator offered itself also to the novel-reader. It 
is full of little novels, or of fragments of such : if we take consecu- 
tively the scattered sketches, telling the history of Sir Eoger De 
Coverley, we shaU find them to constitute a novel as properly as any 
work openly bearing the name. For those who were somethmg 
more than idlers, there were held out objects much higher ; objects 
of contemplation which lead us to think better of the age, than 
we could if we had only Pope or Swift to look to as its expositors. 
Of this more ambitious and serious character are many single papers 
of Addison's, and several groups of papers in each of which 
he carried out a systematic train of thought. We might 
find such, especially, throughout the last volume of the Spectator. 
But it is enough to cite, of his religious meditations, the essays on 
the Immortality of the Soul ; and to point out a few where he 
expatiates in another walk of reflection. His papers on the Pleas- 
ures of the Imagination are highly meritorious as sinking a shaft 
in unbroken ground; and his criticisms on Milton, if not very 
abstruse, are full of taste and sensibility, and were the earliest public 
recognition of the greatness of that great poet. * 

* JOSEPH ADDISON. 

I. A Ghost Story : from the Spectator ; No. 110. 
At a little distance from Sir Eoger 's house, among the ruin%of an old abbey, 



1. 1672. \ 
rf.l719.| 



THE PROSE OF ADDISON. 327 

there is a long walk of aged elms ; which are shot up so very high, that, 
when one passes under them, the rooks and crows that rest on the tops of 
them seem to be cawing in another region. I am very much delighted with 
this sort of noise ; which I consider as a kind of natural prayer to that 
Being who supplies the wants of his whole creation, and who, in the beau- 
tiful language of the Psalms, feedeth the young ravens that call upon him. 

I like this retirement the better, because of an ill report it lies under of 
being haunted ; for which reason (as I have been told in the family) no living 
creature ever walks in it besides the chaplain. My good friend the butler 
desired me, with a very grave face, not to venture myself in it after sunset ; 
for that one of the footmen had been almost frighted out of his wits, by a spirit 
that appeared to him in the shape of a black horse without a head : to which 
he added, that about a month ago one of the maids, coming home late that 
way with a pail of milk upon her head, heard such a rustling among the 
bushes that she let it fall. 

I was taking a walk in this place last night between the hours of nine and 
ten ; and could not but fancy it one of the most proper scenes in the world 
for a ghost to appear in. The ruins of the abbey are scattered up and down on 
every side, and half covered with ivy and elder-bushes, the harbours of 
several solitary birds which seldom make their appearance till the dusk of 
the evening. The place was formerly a churchyard, and has still several 
marks in it of graves and burying-places. There is such an echo among the 
old ruins and vaults, that, if you stamp but a little louder than ordinary, you 
hear the sound repeated. At the same time the walk of elms, Avith the 
croaking of the ravens which from time to time are heard from the tops of 
them, looks exceedingly solemn and venerable. These objects naturally 
raise seriousness and attention ; and, when night heightens the awfulness of 
the place, and pours out her supernumerary horrors upon everything in it, 
I do not at all wonder that weak minds fill it with spectres and apparitions. 

In this solitude, where the dusk of the evening conspired with so many 
other occasions of terror, I observed a cow grazing not far from me, which 
an imagination that was apt to startle might easily have construed into a 
black horse without a head ; and I daresay the poor footman lost his wits 
upon some such trivial occasion. 

II. Reflections : from the Essays " On the Pleasures of the Imagination f' 
Spectator^ Nos. 411-4:21. 

The Supreme Author of our being has made everything that is beautiful 
in all objects pleasant, or rather has made so many objects appear beau- 
tiful, that He might render the whole creation more gay and delightful. 
He has given almost everything about us the power of raising an agreeable 
idea in the imagination ; so that it is impossible for us to behold His works 
with coldness or indifference, and to survey so many beauties without a secret 
satisfaction and complacency. 

"We are everywhere entertained with pleasing shows and apparitions ; we 
discover imaginary glories in the heavens and on the earth, and see some of 
this visionary beauty poured out upon the whole creation : but what a rough 
unsightly sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her colour- 
ing disappear, and the several distinctions of light and shade vanish ! In 
short, our souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing 



328 THE AGE OF QUEEN ANNE. 

delusion : and we walk about like the enchanted hero in a romance, who sees 
beautiful castles, woods, and meadows, and at the same time hears the war- 
bling of birds and the purling of streams ; but, upon the finishing of some 
secret spell, the fantastic scene breaks up, and the disconsolate knight finds 
himself on a barren heath or in a solitary desert. It is not improbable that 
something like this may be the state of the soul after its first separation, in 
respect of the images it will receive from matter. 

* * * * * 

As the writers in poetry and fiction borrow their several materials from 
outward objects, and join them together at their own pleasure, there are 
others who are obliged to follow nature more closely, and to take entire 
scenes out of her. Such are historians, natural philosophers, travellers, 
geographers ; and, in a word, all who describe visible objects of a real exis- 
tence. 

Among this set of writers, there are none who more gratify and enlarge the 
imagination than the authors of the new philosophy ; whether we consider 
their theories of the earth or heavens, the discoveries they have made by 
glasses, or any other of their contemplations on nature. "We are not a little 
pleased to find every green leaf swarm with millions of animals, that at their 
largest growth are not visible to the naked eye. There is something very 
engaging to the fancy, as well as to our reason, in the treatises of metals, 
minerals, plants, and meteors. But, when we survey the whole earth at 
once, and the several planets that lie within its neighbourhood, we are filled 
with a pleasing astonishment, to see so many worlds hanging one above 
another, and sliding round their axles in such an amazing pomp and so- 
lenmity. If, after this, we contemplate those wild fields of ether, that reach 
in height as far as from Saturn to the fixed stars, and run abroad almost to 
an infinitude, our imagination finds its capacity filled with so immense a 
prospect, and puts itself upon the sti-etch to comprehend it. But, if we yet 
rise higher, and consider the fixed stars as so many vast oceans of flame, that 
are each of them attended with a difi"erent set of planets ; and still discover 
new firmaments and new lights that are sunk farther in those unfathomable 
depths of ether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our telescopes : we 
are lost in such a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the im- 
mensity and magnificence of nature. 



MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 329 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE EiaHTEENTH CENTURY. 

SECTION THIRD : THE LITERATURE OF THE SECOND GENERATION. 
A. D. 1727— A. D. 1760. 

GEORGE II. :— 1727— 1760. 



Prose. 1. Theology — Warburton — Bishop Butler's Analogy — Watts and 
Doddridge — Philosophy — Butler's Ethical System — The Metaphysics of 
David Hume — Jonathan Edwards — Franklin.— 2. Miscellaneous Prose — 
Minor Writers — New Series of Periodical Essays — Magazines and Reviews. 
— 3. Samuel Johnson — His Life — His Literary Character. — 4. Johnson's 
Works. — 5. The Novelists — Their Moral Faultiness. — Poetey. 6. The 
Drama— Non-Dramatic Poetry — Rise in Poetical Tone — Didactic Poems 
— Johnson — Young — Akenside — Narrative and Descriptive Poems — 
Thomson's Seasons. — 7. Poetical Taste of the Public — Lyrical Poems of 
Gray and Collins. 

PROSE LITERATURE. 

1. Among the Theological Writers who maybe assigned tothereign of 
G-eorge the Second, the most widely famous in his day, though by no 
means the most meritorious, was the arrogant and pugnacious Bishop 
Warburton. His best-known work, "The Divine Legation of Moses," 
is admitted to be, notwithstanding its curious variety of illustra- 
tion, worthless in regard to its main design. Greater value is attrib- 
uted to his defence of church-establishments, and his vindications of 
the Christian faith against infidelity. The latter task, however, was 
5.1692.") performed with incomparably greater ability, in Bishop 
d. 1752./ Butler's "Analogy of Eeligion, Natural and Eevealed, to 
the Constitution and Course of Nature." This admirable treatise, 
one of the most exact pieces of reasoning in any language, is in- 
tended to show, that all objections which can be urged, either 
against the Religion of Nature or against that of Christianity, are 
equally valid in disproof of truths which are universally believed, 
and which regulate the whole tenor of human action. No writer 



330 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

can be further than Butler from being either eloquent or elegant : 
and his incessant tide of close reasoning calls for very severe exertion, 
on the part of those who would be borne along on the stream with 
intelligent attention. His bareness and clumsiness of style are proofs 
of that sterling and extraordinary force of thought, which impresses 
us so deeply without any extraneous assistance. 

The works in Practical Theology were increasingly numerous ; and 
some of them, such as the eloquent sermons of Sherlock, retain a 
place in literary history. Hervey's writings do not deserve that 
honour for any thmg except their goodness of intention. But there 
is much literary merit in those of the gently pious Watts, and still 
more in those of the fervidly devout Doddridge. Nor were these 
two the only men who supported the reputation of the Nonconfor- 
mists. Leland did good service by his dissections of deistical 
writers ; and Lardner's works are still of very high worth, as stores 
both of learning and of thought. 

In the Church of England, and out of it, there was a waxing zeal, 
and a more cordial recognition of the importance of religion : and 
much good was done, through seeming separation, by the increased 
prosperity of the Dissenters, and the formation of the two bodies of 
Methodists. These were things which gradually leavened much of 
the literature of the times. 

Meanwhile Philosophy had distinguished votaries, with Butler at 
their head. The high-toned Ethical System of this excellent thinker 
has received full justice from most of our recent speculators on the 
theory of morals. Much inferior in power as well as clearness, but 
still useful, in the same field, was Hutcheson, an Irishman, who 
taught in Glasgow, and has sometimes been called the founder of 
the Scottish school of mental science. He contributed also to the 
Theory of Art ; in which, and in that of Language, much ingenuity 
was shown by Harris. To that generation belongs Hartley's at- 
tempt to resolve all mental phenomena into the association of ideas ; 
a view which, though almost always resisted in Scotland, has found 
in England many distinguished supporters. 

6,1711.) In that earlier portion of his life, too, David Hume pub- 
d. 1776./ lished his Philosophical Works; works which must be 
allowed, even by those who dissent most strenuously from their 
results, to have constituted an epoch and turning point in the his- 
tory of Metaphysics. We must not be alarmed, by the religious 
infidelity of this celebrated man, into a forgetfulness of the value 
which belongs to his metaphysical speculations, wrong as his opin- 
ions here also will be admitted to have been. In acceptmg the 
principles of philosophy, which had been received by the metaphy- 



THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND MISCELLANIES. 331 

sicians of our country, and showing that these led to no conclusion 
but universal doubt, he served philosophy as the architect serves 
the owner of a house when he lays bare a flaw in its foundations. 
The exposure could not have been more thoroughly made, than in 
his clear, calm, thoughtful fragments of acute objection. Succeeding 
thinkers have accepted the challenge ; and, amidst all differences of 
opinion as to the success of the methods by which the attack has 
been met, it may at least be asserted safely, that, but for Hume, 
philosophy would have wanted, not only the subtle speculations of 
Kant, but the more modest and cautious systems of Reid and the 
rest of the Scottish school. 

Before quitting the theological and philosophical literature of 
this generation, we must record, as belonging to it, the first remark- 
able name which America contributed to the history of English let- 
h. 1703. \ *^i'^- Of Jonathan Edwards, it was said by Mackintosh, 
<z. 1758.1 that "his power of subtile argument was perhaps un- 
matched, certainly unsurpassed among men." The religious value 
possessed by the writings of this excellent man, is far from being 
their only claim on our attention. Some of them hold a place, 
which they are not likely to lose, in the annals of mental philoso- 
phy. Perhaps no process of metaphysical and psychological reason- 
ing has ever had a wider or more commanding influence, than his 
celebrated treatise On the Will ; and his works On Eeligious Affec- 
tions, and On the Nature of Vu-tue, entitle him to be enrolled with 
distinction among the cultivators of ethical science. 

Along with him we may set down, in passing to a different depart- 
ment, the name of another of the great men who have arisen among 
fc. 1706."! 0^^ Transatlantic kinsmen. Benjamin Franklin, though 
d. 1790. J most famous in the history of his country and in that of 
physical science, might almost be ranked among the teachers of 
practical ethics ; and, at any rate, his homely sagacity and vigour 
forbid his being forgotten among the miscellaneous writers of his 
time. His literary activity belongs chiefly to the period which we 
are now surveying. 

2. The Miscellaneous Literature of this, the age of Johnson, can- 
not in any respect stand comparison with that which was headed 
by Addison. 

We encounter a new group of Periodical Essays, which are but 
poor successors to the Spectator. First, commencing in 1750, came 
the " Rambler," written almost entirely by Johnson. It has little of 
liveliness besides the inapt name : its few attempts at humour are 
very heavy, and its sketches of character disappointingly meagre. 
But it is full of the author's finest vein of religious moralizing. It 



332 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

was followed by the " Adventurer" of Hawkesworth, the best and 
earliest of Johnson's imitators, but not more than an imitator ; by 
the " "World," edited by Moore the dramatist, and more amusing, 
though without much substance ; and by the Connoisseur, which 
is chiefly notable for containing several papers by the poet Cowper, 
the only links connecting him with the time we are now studying. 
The series was closed in 1758 by the " Idler" of Johnson. 

Essays, Criticisms, and Imaginative Sketches, were now received 
into another class of periodicals, the Magazines and Eeviews. 
These, though as yet neither very systematic nor exercising much 
influence, employed the talent, and assisted in furnishing the liveli- 
hood, of some of the best writers of the time. The " Gentleman's 
Magazine," which still survives, was enriched for years by the 
toil of Johnson : the Monthly Eeview, conducted ably by less fa- 
mous writers, called forth, by its patronage of Whiggism and Dis- 
sent, the Critical Review to advocate Tory and High-Church prin- 
ciples ; a task chiefly performed, with equal ability and vehemence, 
by Smollett, and sometimes assisted in by Johnson. 

Throughout this generation, as in that before it. Historical Writing 
had hardly any merit beyond the industrious collection of materials. 
Almost the only exceptions were Hooke's spiritedly written Roman 
History, Middleton's Life of Cicero, and Jortin's Life of Erasmus. 

"We lose little by not learning the names of other minor writers, 
and passing to that of one who was the most industrious as well as 
the most celebrated among the professional authors of the eighteenth 
century. 

&. i709.> 3- Samuel Johnson, compelled by poverty to leave his 
d. 1784.]" education at Oxford uncompleted, came to London in 1737, 
to seek the means of living. Thenceforth, unpatronized and long 
obscure, and failing in repeated attempts to extricate himself from 
a profession which is always more harassing and uncertain than any 
other, and was then peculiarly painful to a high-minded man, he 
laboured with dogged perseverance till, in the beginning of George 
the Third's reign, a pension enabled liim to relax his efforts, and 
enjoy in his declining years the fame he had so hardly won. 

"Won it was not till, in his own desponding words, " most of those' 
whom he wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had 
little to fear or to hope from censure or from praise." Yet the 
celebrity which did at length surround him, in the generation after 
that which we are now surveying, was such as might have satiated 
the most grasping literary ambition ; and the influence which his writ- 
ings had was so vast, that it now makes us wonder, whether we look 
to their bulk, their topics, or their contents. That their reputation 



THE WORKS OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 333 

was above their deserts, cannot and must not be denied. But they 
are the fruit of a singularly strong and original mind, working with 
imperfect knowledge and inadequate scope for activity : and the 
neglect to which they are now consigned does harm to those who 
are guilty of it ; because the literature of our time is generally 
deficient in many of the excellences he has, both of thought and of 
expression. 

His language is unquestionably superior to his matter. Ridicu- 
lous as his antithetically balanced pomp of words always becomes 
in weaker hands, and sometimes in his own, he has striking force 
and aptness of diction, especially when his feelings are so highly 
Avrought as to kindle his sluggish imagination into the intensely 
smouldering heat which it often assumes. Many of his sentences roll 
in on the ear like the sound of the distant sea ; and the thoughts they 
convey impress us so vividly, that we are slow to scrutinize their 
quality. His merit as a thinker lies almost enthely in two depart- 
ments, morals and criticism. In the former he has little originality 
of general principles, but much in special views, with very great 
clearness, sagacity, and elevation. In the latter he is weak when 
he examines details, and in all points dependent on fine suscepti- 
bility : but in his mastery of general laws he is much in advance of 
his age ; and his theoretical opinions, in regard to many questions 
of the poetical art, are as sound as any that could be formed by a 
man whose natm'al sense of poetical beauty was very far from 
being keen. Everywhere, however, he is inconsistent and un- 
equal ; partly through gloominess and irritability of temper, aggra- 
vated by a life of disappointment and excessive toil ; and partly 
because he never was able to bring to ripeness in his miiad any 
coherent system of opinions, even in regard to those questions on 
which he oftenest thought and wrote.* 

"* SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
I. From " Rasselas ;" The Hermit tired of Solitude. 

The hermit set flesh and Avine before them ; though he fed only upon 
fruits and water. His discoui'se was cheerful without levity, and pious with- 
out enthusiasm. 

At last Imlac began thus : " I do not now wonder that your reputation is 
so far extended : we have heard at Cairo of your wisdom, and came hither to 
implore your direction for this young man and maiden in the Choice of Life. " 

" To him that lives well," answered the Hermit, " every form of life is 
good ; nor can I give any other rule for choice, than to remove from all appa- 
rent evil." 

"He will remove most certainly from evil," said the prince, "who shall 



334 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

4. The only great undertaking lie engaged in was his Dictionary, 
which was his chief occupation for eight years. Highly honourable 
to the writer, in the circumstances in which it was produced, it 
is now worthless to the student of language, being very poor and 
incorrect in etymology, and unsatisfactory though acute in definition. 

devote himself to that solitude which you have recommended by your ex- 
ample." 

" I have indeed lived fifteen years in solitude," said the hermit, " but have 
no deshe that my example should gain any imitators. In my youth I pro- 
fessed arms, and was raised by degrees to the highest military rank^ I have 
traversed wide countries at the head of my troops, and seen many battles and 
sieges. At last, being disgusted by the preferments of a younger officer, and 
feeling that my vigour was beginning to decay, I resolved to close my life in 
peace, having found the world full of snares, discord, and misery. I had once 
escaped from the pursuit of the enemy by the shelter of this cavern, and there- 
fore chose it for my final residence. I employed artificers to form it into 
chambers, and stored it with all that I was likely to want. 

" For some time after my retreat, I rejoiced like a tempest-beaten sailor at 
his entrance into the harbour, being delighted with the sudden change of 
the noise and hurry of war to stillness and repose. When the pleasure of 
novelty went away, I employed my hours in examining the plants which 
grew in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks. But 
that inquiry is now grown tasteless and irksome. I have been for some time 
unsettled and distracted : my mind is disturbed with a thousand perplexities 
of doubt and vanities of imagination, which hourly prevail upon me, because 
I have no opportunities of relaxation or diversion. I am sometimes ashamed 
to think, that I could not secure myself from vice, but by retiring from the 
exercise of virtue ; and begin to suspect that I was rather impelled by resent- 
ment, than led by devotion, into solitude. My fancy riots in scenes of folly ; 
and I lament that I have lost so much and have gained so little. In solitude, 
if I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conver- 
sation of the good. I have been long comparing the evils with the advan- 
tages of society, and resolve to return into the world to-morrow. The life of 
a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout." 

They heard his resolution with surprise, but, after a short pause, ofiiered to 
conduct him to Cairo. He dug up a considerable treasure which he had hid 
among the rocks, and accompanied them to the city ; on which, as he ap- 
proached it, he gazed with rapture. 

II. From the '-'• BamUerf^ No. 2 ; Man's Propensity toLooTc to the Future, 

That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately be- 
fore it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losmg 
itself in schemes of future felicity ; and that we forget the proper use of the 
time now in our power, to provide for the enjoyment of that which perhaps 
may never be granted us, has been frequently remarked : and, as this practice 
is a commodious subject of raillery to the gay, and of declamation to the 
serious, it has been ridiculed with all the pleasantry of wit, and exaggerated 
with all the amplifications of rhetoric. 

This quality, of looking forward into futurity, seems the unavoidable con- 



THE WORKS OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, 335 

His otlier Prose Writings were short ; and a huge mass of them, in 
the shape of prefaces, essays, criticisms, and controversial tracts, is 
lost in periodicals or otherwise forgotten. His Poems are of Pope's 
school, and would hardly have preserved his name. Yet his "Lon- 
doti," published at the same time with a satire of Pope's, was warmly 
and deservedly admired by that jealous poet : and " The Vanity of 
Human Wishes," while it contains some flashes of poetry, is mov- 
ing for the deep and thoughtful melancholy of its tone. The 
"Rambler" is perhaps more characteristic, both for merit and defect, 
' than any of his other works ; unless we choose rather to derive our 
knowledge of him from " Rasselas," a novel in form but m little 
else. After his release from penury came his edition of Shak- 
speare, of which it is small praise to say that it is not so bad as 
Pope's : but the famous Preface to it is highly valuable, not for 
its eloquence only, but for many of its speculations on the theory 
of dramatic poetry. It is an extraordinary mixture of narrow and 
erroneous trifling, with true and novel opinions, clearly conceived, and 
stated with great vigour and vivacity of expression. Among the other 

dition of a being, whose motions are gradual, and whose life is progressive. 
As his powers are limited, he must use means for the attainment of his ends, 
and intend first what he performs last : as, by continual advances from his 
first stage of existence, he is perpetually varying the horizon of his prospects, 
he must always discover new motives of action, new excitements of fear, and 
allurements of desire. 

The end, therefore, which at present calls forth our efforts, will be found, 
when it is once gained, to be only one of the means to some remoter end. 
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but 
from hope to hope. 

He that directs his steps to a certain point, must frequently turn his eyes 
to that place which he strives to reach : he that undergoes the fatigue of 
labour, must solace his weariness with the contemplation of its reward. In 
agriculture, one of the most simple and necessary employments, no man 
turns up the ground but because he thinks of the harvest ; that harvest which 
blights may intercept, which inundations may sweep away, or which death 
or calamity may hinder him from reaping. 

Yet, as few maxims are widely received or long retained but for some con- 
formity with truth and natm-e, it must be confessed, that this caution against 
keeping our view too intent upon remote advantages, is not without its pro- 
priety or usefulness ; though it may have been recited with too much levity, 
or enforced with too little distinction : for, not to speak of that vehemence of 
desire which presses through right and wrong to its gratification, or that 
anxious inquietude which is justly chargeable with distrust of Heaven, sub- 
jects too solemn for my present purpose ; it frequently happens that, by in- 
dulging early the raptures of success, we forget the measures necessary to 
secure it, and suffer the imagination to riot in the fruition of some possible 
good, till the time of obtaining it has slipt away. 



336 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

works of his later years, was the Tour to the Hebrides, which is 
one of the most pleasant and easy of his writings. Afterwards 
came his " Lives of the Poets," a series of biographies and criti- 
cisms, admirable beyond any of his compositions for its skill of 
narration ; alternately enlightened and unsound in its critical prin- 
ciples ; and frequently debased, as in the lives of Milton and Gray, 
by political prejudices and personal jealousies. 

5. When we pass from Johnson to the Novelists of his time, we 
seem as if leaving the aisles of an august cathedral, to descend into 
the galleries of a productive but ill- ventilated mme. Around us 
clings a foul and heavy air, which youthful travellers in the realm 
of literature cannot safely breathe. We must emerge as speedily 
as possible to the light of day. 

6. 1689. > The series of Novels began in 1741, with Eichardson's 
d. 1761. J a Pamela," which was followed at long intervals by his " Cla- 
rissa Harlowe" and " Su* Charles Grandison." These have a virtu- 
ous aim, and err chiefly by the plainness with which they describe 
vice. Richardson gains, through his business-hke minuteness of 
detail, an air of reality which is sometimes as strong as that of 
Defoe : and it is a pity that his tediousness, his imrelieved serious- 
ness, and his over-wrought sentimentality, go so far towards dis- 
qualifying the reader from appreciating his extraordinary skill 
both in the invention of incidents and in the portraiture of char- 
acter. 

These qualities are united with greater knowledge of the world, 
pregnant wit, much power of thinking, and remarkable ease and 
1. 1707. ) idiomatic strength of style, in the works of Fielding, whose 
d. 1757. j mastery in the art of fictitious narrative has never been ex- 
celled. But his living pictures of familiar life, the whimsical carica- 
tures of Smollett, and the humorous fantasies of Sterne, are alike 
polluted by faults, of which the very smallest are the coarseness of 
language which they had inherited, and the unscrupulous bareness of 
licentious description in which they out- did Richardson. It is not 
merely that their standard of morality is low : they display indiflfer- 
ence to the essential distinctions between right and wrong, in regard 
to some of the cardinal relations of society. The personages whom 
they represent to us, with praise or without blame, act in a way 
which is not merely unworthy of responsible moral agents, but dis- 
graceful according to the most indulgent code that could be laid 
down to regulate the conduct of gentlemen. 

The beginning of the next period (to which indeed some of Smol- 
lett's novels belong) will exhibit a gi-atifying improvement both of 
taste and morals, in the novels and similar writings of Goldsmith. 



POETRY, DRAMATIC x\ND NON-DRAMATIC. 337 



POETICAL LITERATURE. 

6. The Drama of the period now before us has very little literary 
importance. Johnson's one tragedy of "Irene " contains some fine 
blank verse : and the tragedies of Thomson are the undramatic effu- 
sions of a descriptive poet. The "George Barnwell" of Lillo and 
the " Gamester " of Moore are clever specimens of a mongrel kind 
of tragedy ; which, adopting domestic incidents not easily raised into 
the poetical region proper to the drama, fortifies itself impregnably 
against poetry by couchmg its dialogue in prose instead of verse. 
The comedies and farces of the actors Garrick and Foote soon lost 
their value for the stage, and never had much for the literary student. 

In Non-Dramatic Poetry we have to observe, not only the appear- 
ance of several men possessing distinguished genius, but also changes 
which indicated the formation of views in regard to the art, more 
just and comprehensive than those that had been prevalent in the 
preceduig generation. 

In the first place, neither personal sarcasm, nor the chronicling of 
the externals of polite society, was now held to be the task most 
worthy to receive the embellishments of didactic Averse. The key-note 
of a higher strain was struck by Jolmson, and repeated in the Sat- 
&. 1681."! ii'es of Young. This writer, afterwards, in his " Niglit- 
d. 1765. j" Thoughts," produced a work, eloquent perhaps rather than 
poetical, dissertative where true poetry would have been imaginative, 
and studded with conceits as thickly as the metaphysical poems of 
the seventeenth century ; but yet dealing in a fit spirit with the 
most sublime of all themes, and suggesting to meditative minds 
much of imagery and feeling as well as of religious reflection. 
Akin to it in not a few points, but with more force of imagination, 
was the train of gloomy scenes which appears in Blair's " Grave." 
In this poem we note the return of Scotland to the literary arena, 
into which she had for a long time sent no champions of great prow- 
b. 1721.) ess. In Akenside's "Pleasures of Imaguiation,"avivid fancy, 
d. 1770. j j^ warm susceptibility of fine emotion, and an alluring pomp of 
language, are lavished on a series of pictures illustrating the feelings 
of beauty and sublimity. The mischief is, that the poet, theorizing 
and poetizing by turns, loses his hold of his readers more than 
other writers whose topics are less abstract. The philosophical 
thinker finds better teaching elsewhere ; and the poetical student, 
unless he is also metaphysically inclined, has his enthusiasm chilled 
by the obtrusive dissertations. 

It should next be remarked, that the more direct and effective 
forms of poetry came again into favour. The Scottish pastoral drama 

P 



338 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

of Eamsay need not be more than named : closer attention might 
be claimed for the spirited narrative of Falconer's " Shipwreck." 
But the most decisive instance of the growing insight into the true 
h. 1700. ) functions of poetry is furnished by the " Seasons" of Thom- 
d. 1748. J son, which appeared very soon after the completion of Pope's 
Homer. No poet, not Wordsworth hhnself, has ever been inspired 
more than Thomson was, by that love of external nature which is 
the prompter of poetic imagery; and none has felt, with more 
keenness and delicacy, those analogies between the mind and the 
things it looks on, which are the fountain of genume poetic feeling. 
Many of his bits of scenery are more beautiful than any thing else 
of the sort in the whole compass of our literature. His faults are 
heavy : triteness of thought when he becomes argumentative ; sen- 
timental vulgarism when he aims at the dramatic ; and a prevalent 
pomposity and pedantry of diction, which at once forestalled John- 
son and surpassed him. His later work, " The Castle of Indolence," 
is hardly less poetical ; while it is surprisingly free from his beset- 
ting sins. It is, too, the only very strong symptom which the age 
manifested, of sympathy with the older English poets.* 



* JAMES THOMSON. 
A SUMMER DAWN, FROM THE SEASONS. 

And soon, observant of approaching day, 
The meek-ey'd Morn appears, mother of dews, 
At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east ; 
Till far o'er ether spreads the widening glow, 
And, from before the lustre of her face, 
White break the clouds away. — With quicken'd step 
Brown Night retires. Young Day pours in apace, 
And opens all the laAvny prospect wide. 
The dripping rocks, the mountain's misty top, 
Swell on the sight, and brighten with the da^yn. 
Blue, through the dusk, the smoky currents shine : 
And from the bladed field the fearful hare 
Limps, awkward ; while along the forest-glade 
The wild deer trip, and often turning gaze 
At early passenger. Music awakes, 
The native voice of undissembled joy : 
And thick around the woodland hymns arise. 
Eoused by the cock, the soon-clad shepherd leaves 
His mossy cottage, where with peace he dwells 
And from the crowded fold in order drives 
His flock, to taste the verdure of the morn. 

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake, 
And, springing from the bed of sloth, enjoy 



THE POETICAL TASTE OF THE AGE. 339 

7. The middle of the eighteenth century gave birth, we see, to 
good poets ; but it was nevertheless an unpoetical time. Some of 
those with whom we have just become acquainted, owed their pop- 
ularity in part to those very qualities which are the blots of their 
works ; and their genius would have grown up more freely and 
borne richer fruit, had the climate been more propitious. Still later 
in the century, we find the prevailing poetical taste to be curiously 
illustrated by Johnson's " Lives of the Poets." These were introduc- 
tory to a large collection of English Poetry ; the choice being made 
by the booksellers, who may fairly be presumed to have known what 
books were likely to tempt purchasers. We are not surprised to 
find that the older poets of the language were quite excluded ; but 
it is amusing and wonderful to reckon the host of dull rhymers 
from the early part of the century, Avhose works were admitted, and 
thought worthy to employ the pen of the first critic of the day. 

Before that time, two of the finest and most poetical minds of our 
nation had been dwarfed and weakened by the ungenial atmosphere, 
so as to bequeath to posterity nothing more than a few lyrical frag- 
ments. In the age which admired the smooth feebleness of Shen- 
stone's pastorals and elegies, and which closed when the ferocious 
libels of Churchill were held by many to be good examples of the 
poetical satu-e, Collins lived and died almost unknown, and Gray 
turned aside from the unrequited labours of verse to idle in his study. 
h. 1716. ) Gray was as consummate a poetical artist as Pope. His 
d. 1771. J fancy, again, was much less lively : but his sympathies were 
infinitely warmer and more expanded ; and he was unfettered by 

The cool, the fragrant, and the silent hour. 
To meditation due and sacred song ! 
***** 

But yonder comes the powerful King of Day, 
Eejoicing in the east. The lessening cloud, 
The kindling azure, and the mountain's brow 
Illumed with fluid gold, his near approach 
Betoken glad. Lo ! now apparent all, 
Aslant the dew-bright earth and colour'd air, 
He looks in boundless majesty abroad ; 
And sheds the shining day, that burnish 'd plays 
On rocks, and hills, and towers, and wandering streams, 
High-gleaming from afar. Prime cheerer, Light ! 
Of all material beings first, and best ! 
Efflux divine ! Nature's resplendent robe ! 
Without whose vesting beauty all were wrapt 
In unessential gloom ; and thou, oh Sun ! 
Soul of surrounding worlds, in whom best seen 
Shines out thy Maker ! May I sing of thee? 



340 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

the matter-of-fact tendency of the French school. The polished 
aptness of language, and exact symmetry of construction^ which 
give so classical an aspect to his Odes, do unquestionably bring 
with them a tinge of classical coldness ; and the want of passionate 
movement is felt particularly in his most ambitious pieces. He is 
stronger in feeling than in imagery : the Ode on Eton College, with 
its touches of pathos and flashes of allegory, is more genuinely 
lyrical than " The Bard ;" and the " Progress of Poesy " is most 
poetical in its passages of fanciful repose. The Elegy in a Coun- 
try Churchyard is perhaps faultless.* 

* THOMAS GRAY. 
From the " Ode on a Distant Prosjpect of Eton College.''^ 

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, 

That crown the watery glade, 
"Where grateful science still adores 

Her Henry's hoary shade ; 
And ye that from the stately brow 
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below 

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey; 
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among 
Wanders the hoary Thames along 

His silver-winding way ! 

Ah, happy hills ! Ah, pleasing shade ! 

Ah, fields beloved in vain ! 
Where once my careless childhood strayed, 

A stranger yet to pain : 
I feel the gales that from ye blow, 
A momentary bliss bestow, 

As, waving fresh their gladsome wing, 
My weary soul they seem to soothe, 
And, redolent of joy and youth. 

To breathe a second spring. 

Say, Father Thames ! for thou hast seen 

Full many a sprightly race. 
Disporting on thy margin green. 

The paths of pleasure trace ; 
Who foremost now delight to cleave 
With pliant arm thy glassy wave ? 

The captive linnet which enthral ? 
What idle progeny succeed. 
To chase the rolling circle's speed, 

Or urge the flying ball ? 
* * * * 

Gay hope is theirs, by fancy fed. 

Less pleasing when possess 'd. 
The tear forgot as soon as shed, 

The sunshine of the breast. 



THE ODES OF COLLINS. 341 

5. 1720.) The Odes of Collins are fuller of the fine and spontane- 
d. 1759. j" Qus enthusiasm of genius, than any other poems ever writ- 
ten by one who wrote so little. We close his tiny volume with the 
same disappointed surprise, which overcomes us when a harmonious 
piece of music suddenly ceases unfinished. His range of tones is 
very wide : it extends from the warmest rapture of self-entranced 
imagination, to a tenderness which makes some of his verses sound 
like gentle weepmg. The delicacy of gradation with which he 
passes from thought to thought, has an indescribable charm, though 
not always unattended by obscurity; and there is a marvellous 
power of suggestion in his clouds of allegoric imagery, so beautiful 
in outline, and coloured by a fancy so purely and ideally refined. 
His most popular poem, " The Passions," can hardly be allowed to 
be his best : of some of his most deeply marked characteristics it 
conveys no adequate idea. Eeaders who do not shrink from having 
their attention put to the stretch, and who can relish the finest and 
most recondite analogies, will delight in his Ode entitled " The 



Theirs buxom health, of rosy hue, 
Wild wit, invention ever new. 

And lively cheer, of vigour born ; 
The thoughtless day, the easy night, 
The spirits pu,re, the slumbers light, 

That fly the approach of morn. 



Ambition this shall tempt to rise, 

Then whirl the wretch from high, 
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice, 

And grinning Infamy. 
The stings of Falsehood those shall try. 
And hard Unkindness' alter'd eye. 

That mocks the tear it forced to flow 
And keen Kemorse, with blood defiled. 
And moody Madness, laughing wild 

Amid severest woe. 



To each his sufferings ! All are men, 

Condemn'd alike to groan ; 
The tender for another's pain, 

The unfeeling for his own. 
Yet, ah ! why should they know their fate ; 
Since sorrow never comes too late, 

And happiness too swiftly flies ? 
Thought would destroy their paradise. 
No more ! where ignorance is bliss, 

'Tis folly to be wise ! 



342 MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Manners," and in that, still nobler and more imaginative, " On the 
Poetical Character." Every one, surely, can understand and feel 
the beauty of such pieces as the Odes " To Pity," " To Simplicity," 
" To Mercy." Nor does it requhe much reflection to fit us for 
appreciating the spiiited lyric "To Liberty;" or for being en- 
tranced by the finely- woven harmonies and the sweetly romantic 
pictures, which, in the " Ode to Evening," remind us of the youthful 
poems of Milton.* 

* WILLIAM COLLINS. 
I. ODE WRITTEN IN THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1746. 

How sleep the hrave who sink to rest, 
By all theu' country's wishes blest ! 
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, 
Eeturns to deck their hallowed mould, 
She there shall dress a sweeter sod 
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. 

By Fairy hands their knell is rung ; 
By forms unseen their dirge is sung : 
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, 
To bless the turf that wraps their clay ; 
And Freedom shall awhile repair. 
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there. 

II- ODE TO PITY. 

Fella's Bard is Euripides : The river Arun runs by tJie birthplace of Otway. 

Oh thou, the friend of man, assign 'd 
"With balmy hands his wounds to bind, 

And charm his frantic woe ; 
When first Distress, with dagger keen, 
Broke forth to waste his destined scene, 

His wild unsated foe ! 

By Pel la's Bard, a magic name, 

By all the griefs his thought could frame, 

Eeceive my humble rite ! 
Long, Pity ! let the nations view 
Thy sky- worn robes of tenderest blue, 

And eyes of dewy light ! 

But wherefore need I wander wide 
To old Ilyssus' distant side, 

Deserted stream and mute ? 
Wild Arun too has heard thy strains. 
And Echo, 'midst my native plains, 

Been soothed by Pity's lute. 



THE ODES OF COLLINS. 343 

Come, Pity, come ! By Fancy's aid, 
Ev'n now my thoughts, relenting maid I 

Thy temple's pride design : 
Its southern site, its truth complete, 
Shall raise a wild enthusiast heat 

In all who view the shrine. 

There Picture's toil shall well relate 
How Chance, or hard-involving Fate, 

O'er mortal bliss prevail : 
The huskin'd Muse shall near her stand, 
And, sighing, prompt her tender hand 

With each disastrous tale. 

There let me oft, retired by day. 
In dreams of passion melt away, 

Allowed with thee to dwell ; 
There waste the mournful lamp of night, 
Till, Virgin ! thou again delight 

To hear a British shell ! 



344 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CEKTURY. 



CHAPTEE XIL 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE LITERATURE OF THE THIRD GENERATION. 

A. D. 1760— A. D. 1800. 

George III., 1760-1800. 

Prose. 1. The Historians— Their Literary Character and Views of Art — 
Hume's History. — 2. Eobertson and Gibbon — The Character of each — 
Minor Historical Writers. — 3. Miscellaneous Prose — Johnson's Talk and 
Boswell's Eeport of it — Goldsmith's Novels — Literature in Scotland — The 
fii'st Edinburgh Eeview — Mackenzie's Novels — Other Novelists. — 4. Crit- 
icism — Percy's Eeliques — Warton's History — Parliamentary Eloquence 
— Edmund Burke — Letters. — 5. Philosophy — (1.) Theory of Literature — 
Burke — Eeynolds — Campbell — Home — Blair — Smith — (2.) Political Econ- 
omy — Adam Smith. — 6. Philosophy continued — (3.) Ethics — Adam 
Smith — Tucker — Paley — (4.) Metaphysics and Psychology — Thomas Eeid. 
—7. Theology— (1.) Scientific— Campbell— Paley— Watson— Lowth— (2.) 
Practical — Porteous — Blair — Newton and others. — Poetry. 8. The 
Drama — Home's Douglas — Comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan — Gold- 
smith's Descriptive Poems. — 9. Minor Poets — Their Various Tendencies 
— Later Poems — Beattie's Minstrel. — 10. The Genius and Writings of 
Cowper and Burns. 

PROSE LITERATURE. 

1. Between the period we have last studied, and the reign of 
George the Third, there were several connecting links. One of 
these was formed by a group of Historians, whose works must 
always be classical monuments in English literature. The publica- 
tion of Hume's History of England began in 1754 : Robertson's 
History of Scotland appeared in 1759, and was followed by his 
Reign of Charles the Fifth, and his History of America ; and Gib- 
bon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was completed in 
twelve years from 1776. 

These celebrated men, and others who profited by their teaching, 
viewed a great history as a work of literary art, as a work in which 
the manner of communication ought to possess an excellence corre- 



THE HISTORICAL WRITERS. 345 

spondent to the value of the knowledge communicated. It is like- 
wise characteristic of them, that, while all were active thinkers, and 
found or made occasion for imparting the fruits of their reflection, 
their works are properly Histories, not Historical Dissertations. 
They are narratives of events, in which the elucidation of the laws 
of human nature or of the progress of society is introduced merely 
as illustrative and subordinate. The distinction is note-worthy for 
us, id whose time the favourite method of historical writing is of the 
contrary kind. 

Perhaps history, so conceived and lunited, was never written 
h. 1711. ) better than by David Hume. Never was the narrative of 
d. 1776. J interesting incidents told with greater clearness, and good- 
sense, and quiet force of representation : never were the characters, 
and thoughts, and feelings of historical personages described in a 
manner more calculated to excite the feeling of dramatic reality, yet 
without oversteppmg the propriety of historical truth, or trespass- 
ing on the prominence due to great facts and great principles. His 
style may be said to display, generically, the natural and colloquial 
character of the early writers of the century. But it is specifically 
distinguished by features giving it an aspect very unlike theirs. It 
has not their strength and closeness of idiom ; a want attributable 
to two causes. Hume was a Scotsman, born in a country whose 
dialect was then yet more distant than it now is from English 
purity ; and French studies concurred with French reading in de- 
termining stni fm-ther his turn of phraseology and construction. 
It has been the duty of more recent writers to protest against his 
strong spirit of partisanship, which is made the more seductive by his 
constant good-temper and kindlmess of manner; and his consul- 
tation of original authorities was so very negligent, that his evidence 
is quite worthless on disputed historical questions. But, if his 
matter had been as carefully studied as his manner, and if his social 
and religious theories had been as sound as his theory of literary 
art, Hume's history would still have held a place from which no 
rival could have hoped to degrade it. 

2. In their manner of expression, Robertson and Gibbon, though 
unlike each other, are equally unlike Hume. They want his seem- 
ingly unconscious ease, his delicate tact, his calm yet lively smi- 
plicity. Hume teUs his tale to us as a friend to friends : his succes- 
sors always seem to hold that they are teachers and we their pupils. 
This change of tone had long been coming on, and was now very 
general in aU departments of prose : very few writers belonging 
to the last thirty years of Johnson's life escaped the epidemic dis- 
ease of dictatorship. Both Robertson and Gibbon may have been, 

p2 



346 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

by circumstances peculiar to each of them, predisposed to adopt 
the fasliionable garb of dignity. The temptation of the former lay 
simply in his provmcial position, which made his mastery of the 
language a thing to be attained only by study and imitation. An 
untravelled Scotsman might have aspired to harangue like Rasselas, 
but durst not dream of talking like Will Honeycomb. Yet Robert- 
son attained a degree of facility, smoothness, and correctness, which 
in the circumstances was wonderful. Gibbon's pompousness, which 
has justly become proverbial, was probably caused in part by his 
self-esteem, naturally inordinate, and pampered by years of solitary 
study ; and it must hav£ been cherished also by his half-avowed 
consciousness of the hostility in which his evil religious opinions 
placed him, towards those to whom his work was addressed. The 
peculiarity of his very peculiar style may perhaps be analyzed into 
a few elements. His words are always those of Latin root, not of 
Saxon, unless when these cannot be avoided : his favourite idioms 
and constructions are French, not English : and the structure of his 
sentences is so complex as to threaten obscurity, but so monoto- 
nously miiform that his practised dexterity of hand easily avoided 
the snare. 

1. 1722. 1 Robertson is an excellent story-teller, perspicuous, lively, 
d. 1793.J" and interesting : his opinions are formed with good judg- 
ment, and always temperately expressed : and his disquisitions, such 
as his view of the Progress of Society in the Middle Ages, are sin- 
gularly able and instructive. His research was industrious and 
accm-ate, to a degree which, notwithstanding many unfavourable 
circumstances, makes him still to be a valuable historical authority. 
h. 1737, ") The learning of Gibbon, though not in all points very ex- 
d. 1794. J act, was remarkably extensive ; and it was fully sufficient to 
make him a trustworthy guide through the vast region he traverses, 
unless in those quarters where he was inclined to lead us astray. 
His work was first conceived in Rome, " as he sat musing amidst 
the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing 
vespers in the temple of Jupiter : " and its prevalent tone might, 
with no very wide stretch of fancy, be supposed to retain symptoms 
of that evening's meditation. There is a patrician haughtiness in 
the stately march of his narrative, and in the an- of careless supe- 
riority with which he treats both his heroes and his audience ; and, 
contemplating the actions of his story in such a spirit as if he 
shrunk from Christian truth because he had known it only as 
alloyed by superstitious error, he honours the ruthless bravery of 
the conqueror and the politic craft of the statesman, but is unable to 
appreciate the hermit's humble piety or the heroic self-sacrifice of 



HISTORICAL AND OTHER WRITERS. 347 

the martyr. His manner wants that dramatic animation, which would 
entitle him to be ranked in the highest order of historians, and for 
which he was disqualified by his coldness of feeling. He seems to 
describe, not scenes in which living men act, biit pictures in which 
those scenes are represented : and in this art of picturesque narra- 
tion he is a master. Nor is he less skilful in indhect insinuation ; 
which, indeed, is his favourite and usual method of communicating 
his opinions, although most striking in those many passages in his 
history of the church, where he covertly attacks a religion which 
he neither believed nor understood. 

Among other historians of the time was Smollett, whose History 
of England has no claim to remembrance except the celebrity other- 
wise gained by the author. Ferguson's History of the Eoman 
Republic is not only well written, but meritorious for its researches 
into the constitution of Rome. Of the many historical and anti- 
quarian works, the value of whose matter exceeds their literary 
merit, it may be enough to name those of two Scotsmen ; Henry's 
History of Great Britain, and Sir David Dalrymple's Annals of 
Scotland, both of which have saved much toil to their successors. 
To this period, more conveniently than to the next, may be assigned 
the Grecian Histories of Gilhes and Mitford, each useful in its day, 
especially the latter, but both now altogether superseded. 

3. While the historians thus produced works on which, more than 
on anything else, the literary reputation of the time depended, other 
men of letters exerted themselves so actively and so variously, that 
it is difficult to describe then* efforts briefly. 

b.i709.\ Johnson, seated at last in his easy- chair, talked inces- 
d.md.) santly for twenty years: his dogmatical announcements of 
opinion were received as oracular by the literary world : and, soon 
after his death, Boswell's clever record of his conversations gave 
to the name of this remarkable man a place in our literature, which, 
in our day, is commonly held to be more secure than that which 
he had obtained by his writings. 

In the large circle of his friends and admirers, none was more 
b. 1728. ) respectful or more beloved than the amiable and artless 
c?.i774.j Goldsmith. Yet none of them had so much native origi- 
nahty of genius, or deviated so far from the track of his patron. 
Though his poems had never been written, he would stand among 
the classics of English prose, in virtue of the few trifles on which 
he was able, in the intervals snatched from his literary drudgery, 
to exercise his power of shrewd observation and natural invention, 
and to exhibit his warm affections and purity of moral sentiment. 
Such is his inimitable little novel, *' The Vicar of Wakefield ;" and 



348 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

such, though less valuable, is the good-natured satire on society 
which he called " The Citizen of the World." It consists of letters 
in which a Chinese, visiting England, relates to friends at home 
what he saw and what he thought of it. In good-humoured irony, 
Goldsmith is here admu-able : there are some comic scenes of do- 
mestic life, such as the household of Beau Tibbs, which are not 
surpassed by anything of the sort in our language ; whUe the in- 
terest is varied by little flights of romance, lively criticisms on the 
state of learning and the arts, and despondent caricature (which 
no one had better opportunities of sketching from the life) of the 
miseries of men whose trade was authorship.* Groldsmith's style 

* OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
From " The Citizen of the World:" Letter xxvui. 

Were we to estimate the learning of the English by the number of books 
that are every day published among them, perhaps no country, not even 
China itself, could equal them in this particular. I have reckoned not less 
than twenty-three new books published in one day ; which, upon computution, 
makes eight thousand three hundred and ninety-five in one year. Most of 
these are not confined to one single science, but embrace the whole circle. 
History, politics, poetry, mathematics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of 
nature, are all comprised in a manual not larger than that in which our 
children are taught the letters. If, then, we suppose the learned of England 
to read but an eighth part of the works which daily come from the press, 
(and sure none can pretend to learning upon more easy terms,) at this rate 
eveiy scholar will read a thousand books in one year. From such a calcula- 
tion, you may conjecture Avhat an amazing fund of literature a man must be 
possessed of, who thus reads tliree new books every day, not one of which 
biit contains all the good things that ever were said or Avritten. 

And yet, I know not how it happens : but the English are not, in reality, 
so learned as would seem from this calculation. We meet but few who 
know all arts and sciences in perfection ; whether it is that the generality are 
incapable of such extensive knowledge, or that the authors of those books are 
not adequate instructors. In China, the Emperor himself takes cognizance 
of all the doctors in the kingdom who profess authorship. In England, 
every man may be an author that can write : for they have by law a liberty, 
not only of saying what they please, but of being also as dull as they please. 

Yesterday I testified my surprise to the man in black, where -writers could 
be found in sufiicient number to throw ofi" the books I daily saw crowding 
from the press. I at first imagined, that theu- learned seminaries might take 
this method of instructing the world : but my companion assured me that the 
doctors of colleges never wrote, and that some of them had actually forgot 
their reading. " But, if you desire," continued he, "to see a collection of 
authors, I fancy I can introduce you this evening to a club, which assembles 
every Saturday at seven, at the sign of the Broom near Islington, to talk over 
the business of the last and the entertainment of the week ensuing." 

I accepted his invitation : we walked together, and entered the house some 
time before the usual hour for the company assembling. JMy friend took 



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE. 349 

is as near an approach as his time made possible, to the colloquial 
ease of Addison, 

In the meantime, intellectual action had begun to diffuse itself 
from a new centre. Eduiburgh was the dwelling-place of Robert- 
son and Hume, around whom were gathered other thmking and 
instructed men. In 1755, there was attempted an "Edinburgh 
Review,"' designed to be half-yearly ; but only two numbers ap- 
peared, contauiing several papers written by Robertson, with others 
by Adam Smith and Blair, whom we shall soon meet again in com- 
pany with aspu'ants from more remote parts of Scotland. In 1779, 
the Periodical Essays of Queen Anne's time were revived, almost 
for the last time, by a new race of men of letters, in the Scottish me- 
tropolis. " The Mirror," and its successor, " The Lounger," were 
6. 1745. ) edited by Hemy Mackenzie, whose venerable old-age car- 
d.issi.j j.[q^ -jr^^^ ]^^Q g^ patriarch surviving the flood, through the 
first generation of the nmeteenth century. Tasteful, rather than 
vigorous, those periodicals owe then- chief merit to his smaller tales. 

He had already published his best novel, " The Man of Feeling," 
which, coming not long after Groldsmith's masterpiece, was far 
from being unworthy of the companionship. With little force of 
character, and a finical refinement both of diction and of sentiment, 
Mackenzie's novels have a delightful harmony of feeling, which 
often flows out into pathetic tenderness. 

Among the later novelists of the time, there are none that call for 
much notice. It is enough to name Walpole, Moore, Cumberland, 
Jlrs Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith. The last of these, especially, 
did much to prepare the way for the greater prevalence of nature 
and common-sense in this kind of writing, the seductions of which 
for the writer are not less than those which it holds out to the 
reader. We might not unwillingly be tempted to linger a little 
longer, by the farcical humour of Miss Bm-ney, or the melo-drama- 
tic horrors of Mrs Radcliffe ; and, if we were here inclined to study 
novels deeply, these two writers would, for different reasons, re- 
quire close attention. 

4. In Literary Criticism, the authoritative book of the day was 
Johnson's " Lives of the Poets," with which we have become ac- 
quainted already. Sixteen years before its appearance, there had 
been laid in silence the foundations of a new and purer poetical taste. 
The year 1765 was the date of Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English 

this opportunity of letting me into the characters of the principal members of 
the club ; not even the host excepted, who, it seems, was once an author 
himself, but preferred by a bookseller to this situation as a reward for his 
former service. 



350 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Poetry," a selection from old ballads and other early poems of a 
lyrical cast, many of the ruder pieces being modernized and com- 
pleted by the editor. This delightful compilation, quite neglected 
for many years, became the poetical text-book of Sir Walter Scott 
and the poets of his time. A greater impression was m.ade by a 
more scientific and ambitious effort in the same direction, War- 
h. 1729. "I ton's " History of English Poetry," which was commenced 
d.i790.j in 1774, and left unfinished when the author died. His 
survey starts from a point not long after the Conquest, and is broken 
off abruptly in the reign of Elizabeth. The work has so much both 
of antiquarian learning, of poetical taste, and of spirited writing, 
that it is not only an indispensable and valuable authority, but in 
many parts an interesting book to the mere amateur. Not without 
many errors, and presenting a still larger number of deficiencies, it 
yet has little chance of being ever entirely superseded. Along 
with Warton should be named his ill-natured adversary Ritson, 
who rendered great services to our early poetry, especially by 
setting the example of scrupulously correct editing. 

In elementary studies like ours, we cannot undertake to deal 
with the Parliamentary Eloquence of our country. But we ought 
to learn, that the earliest specimens of its greatness may be said 
to have been given before the middle of the eighteenth century, in 
the commanding addresses of the elder Pitt, more commonly known 
as Earl of Chatham. The close of our period shows us, as still 
leading the senate, the younger Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan ; along 
h. 1730. ■) wi*^ whom stood a much greater man, Edmund Burke, the 
d. 1797. 1 most gorgeous and rotund of orators. Burke, indeed, must 
be remembered, in virtue not only of his speeches, but of his writ- 
ings on political and social questions, as a very great thinker, com- 
prehensive and versatile in intellect, and deriving an extraordinary 
power of eloquence from that concrete and imaginative character 
which belonged distinctively to his manner of thought. 

Our miscellaneous memoranda must contain two collections of 
Letters, thoroughly unlike each other in everything except their 
goodness of style : those of Walpole, poignantly satirical and bad- 
hearted ; and those of the poet Cowper, which are not only models 
of easy writing, but lessons of rare dignity and purity in sentiment. 

5. In the History of Philosophy, for Great Britain as well as for 
the continental nations, the middle of the eighteenth century was a 
very important epoch. It introduced, in our own country, a series 
of thinkers, whose opinions, whether adverse to those of their pre- 
decessors or founded on them, were yet, in most departments of 
philosophical study, entitled to be regarded as new : and, before 



PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS. 351 

the century was ended, almost all those works had appeared, which 
have had the greatest influence on more recent thinking. 

The purpose of our present studies does not allow us to attempt 
knowing thoroughly, or weighing exactly, speculations of an abstract 
kind. The little we can take time to learn may be gathered most easily, 
if all the works we have to deal with are arranged in Four Classes. 

The First of these includes disquisitions on the Theory of Litera- 
ture or any of its applications ; a theory which now began to be 
known among us by the name of Philosophical Criticism, and which 
is really a branch of philosophy properly so called, the philosophy of 
the human mind. Our earliest specimen was Burke's treatise " On 
the Sublime and Beautiful," an inquiry, neither successful nor elo- 
quent, into phenomena, the explanation of which is essential to a 
just theory of poetry. The close relations between poetry and the 
other fine arts, such as painting, might entitle us to include in our 
list a series of treatises much more valuable, the Discourses of the 
celebrated painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. The other works to be 
named are confined to literature ; and, all the writers being Scots- 
men, it was perhaps natural that they should occupy themselves 
much with the laws of style. By far the ablest of these was 
h. 1709.) Campbell's "Philosophy of Rhetoric," a treatise showing, 
d. 1796.) like all the author's works, very much both of cool sagacity 
and of independent thinking. " The Elements of Criticism," by 
Henry Home, usually known as Lord Kames, has a great deal of 
speculative ingenuity ; and the merit of Blair's " Lectures on Rhe- 
toric and Belles Lettres" lies in their good taste and the elaborate 
elegance of the language. Some contributions which Adam Smith 
made to this field of inquiry contain very original views. It is 
convenient, though not quite correct, to class along with these 
writers Home Tooke, who produced, at the close of the century, 
its best contribution to the Philosophy of Language. No book on 
the subject has caused more thinking than his acute and paradoxical 
" Diversions of Purley." 

b. 1723. ) Adam Smith will stand alone in our Second Department, 
ci. 1790./ in virtue of his great work, "The Wealth of Nations," 
which is still universally acknowledged as the standard text-book 
in Political Economy. 

6. We encounter Smith yet again, when we pass, Thirdly, to Ethics 
or Moral Philosophy. His " Theory of Moral Sentiments" is the 
most readable of abstract treatises : its style is excellent ; and its illus- 
trations are abundant and interesting. Many of its special analyses 
of mental phenomena are masterly : but the leading doctrine, which 
resolves all moral feelings into Sympathy, is nothing better than 



352 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

an ingeniously defended paradox. A more prominent place in the 
history of moral science belongs to two English writers, who stand 
related as master and pupil, and agree in seeking to establish the 
identity of Virtue with UtHity. The earlier of them was Tucker, 
whom Paley frankly avowed to have given, by his finely reflective 
"Light of Nature Pursued," very much assistance towards the 
b. 1743.) ethical section of his own " PriQciples of Moral and Political 
d. 1805. j Philosophy." Vigorously homely in language and illustra- 
tion, methodical and dexterous in argument, and imposingly posi- 
tive in assertion, Paley's work could not faO. to be welcomed by 
English thinkers, on account of its skilful defence of a view of human 
nature, which chimes in with the tendencies of the national character. 
Works falling into om- Fourth Department would commonly be 
described as dealing with Metaphysics. But, as they undertake to 
inquire, not only into the origin and validity of human knowledge, 
but also into the nature and relations of all mental phenomena, 
they should be described as treating hkewise of Psychology. They 
are often described by their authors as relating to the Philosophy 
of the Human Mind. We require here to note only the rise of that 
which has been called the Scottish School of Metaphysics ; and in 
b. 1710. ) i*' again we do enough, if we make ourselves acquainted 
d. 1796. J with Thomas Eeid the foimder. For Beattie, the most 
eminent of his immediate disciples, and a very pleasing writer, did 
little or nothing of real service to philosophy. Eeid's doctrines 
were first explained in his " Inquiry into the Human Mind," and 
afterwards systematically expounded in his " Essays on the In- 
tellectual and Active Powers of Man." His position is essen- 
tially controversial. He combats each of three schools of philosophy : 
first, the Sensualistic, evolved out of Locke, which holds aU our 
ideas to be primarily derived from sensation ; secondly, the Ideal- 
istic, in the form proposed by Berkeley, which, allowing the exist- 
ence of mind, denies that of matter ; thirdly, the Sceptical, headed 
by Hume, which denies that we can know anything at aU. The 
first of these doctrines, according to Reid, overlooks important 
elements of knowledge, and leads directly to the third ; the 
second is refuted by every man's consciousness ; and the third 
we cannot so much as assert, without contradicting that very asser- 
tion. The positive doctrines of Reid's own system could not be 
understood without mmch explanation ; and his own exposition of 
them is very imperfect. Indeed the constant occurrence of polemi- 
cal matter, and the repetitions which his Essays derived from their 
original shape of Lectures, are the circumstances that chiefly injure 
the literary value of the work. He is a bald and dry, but very 



THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS. 353 

clear and logical writer ; and never was there a more sincere lover 
of truth, or a more candid and honom-able disputant. His slow and 
patient thinking, notwithstanding a strong aversion to close analysis, 
led him to some very striking results, out of which his whole scheme 
is developed. The origmality of these is much greater than his 
own manner of expounding them would lead us to suppose ; and 
their importance m the history of philosophy may be estimated 
from this fact, that Keid's metaphysical creed does really coincide 
with the first and most characteristic step in that of his German 
contemporary Kant. 

7, It is satisfactory to find, among those we have learned to know 
as leaders in philosophy, several who distinguished themselves also 
as advocates of truths yet more precious. 

The most valuable contributions to Theological Literature were 
those which undertook to defend religion, natural and revealed, 
both against the attacks of avowed infidelity, and against the more 
msidious dangers that arose, towards the close of the century, from 
the ferment of opinions communicated by the convulsions of the 
continent. The series began with Campbell's excellently reasoned 
" Essay on Miracles," an answer to the most popular of Hume's 
arguments against revelation. Paley's three works of this class are, 
all of them, standard authorities. In the "Horse Paulinse" he 
proves, from undesigned coincidences, the genuineness both of Saint 
Paul's Epistles and of the narrative given in the Acts of the Apos- 
tles. His " View of the Evidences of Christianity" is chiefly em- 
ployed in establishing the credibility of the evangelists ; from which 
must be inferred the truth of the gospel miracles, and from that 
again the divine mission of the Saviour. His " Natural Theology" 
is an illustration, alike skilful and interesting, of that which has 
been called the a posteriori argument for the existence of the Su- 
preme Being ; an argument founded on the proofs of benevolent de- 
sign manifested in the works of creation. Last of aU we have Bishop 
Watson's vigorous " Apology for Christianity," directed agauist Gib- 
bon ; and his " Apology for the Bible," in which he answers, with 
equal force, the cavils of a more recent and less able adversary. 

Among the other works of the times, in which theology was 
treated scientifically, the most noticeable are those which may be 
described as Critical. Such were Bishop Lowth's refined and 
tasteful " Lectures on the Poetry of the Hebrews," and his " Trans- 
lation of the Prophet Isaiah." Of another temper, energetic and 
original in thinking, and very powerfully suggestive of thought, 
were the views set forth by Campbell, in his " Translation of the 
Gospels," with its dissertations. 



354 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

The press now teemed with Sermons, and gave forth also not a 
few larger treatises on points of Practical Theology. Most of these, 
however, do not exemplify so well the literary abUity of the age, as 
the increasing inclination of men's minds to serious thought and 
sentiment. Of the sermon-writers who were then most popular, 
especially among educated persons, but whose works are now much 
neglected, those whose literary merit is highest were Bishop Por- 
teous and Dr Blair. An influence much more permanent has been 
exerted by a class of religious writers, whose views had always 
found literary representatives in the Church of England, but had 
been more decisively expressed by the earlier Nonconformists : 
writers whose ecclesiastical code was taught by Usher, not by 
Laud ; writers whose confession of religious faith, not less than their 
tone of religious feeling, was inherited from Usher and Owen, not 
from Tillotson or South. Eminent among the most devout and 
energetic teachers of religion in this devout and energetic school, 
was John Newton of Olney, the spiritual guide of the poet Cowper. 
We might refer either to the last century, or to the present, a 
few other writings of no great literary merit, bearing the same hon- 
ourable stamp: the novels and miscellaneous works of Hannah 
More ; Wilberforce's " Practical View of Christianity ; and " The 
History of the Church of Christ" by the brothers Milner. 

POETICAL LITEEATUEE. 

8. Sinking from theology to the Drama, we shaU not be detained 
long from other kinds of poetry. The only Tragedy of our forty 
years which has really survived, is the " Douglas" of Home, whose 
sweet melody and romantic pathos lose much of their effect through 
its artificial monotony of tone, and its feebleness in the representa- 
tion of character. Mason's Caractacus, an historical tragedy with 
a classical chorus, is memorable for the courage of the attempt. 
Comedy, now always written in prose, was oftener successful, yet 
not very often. There was no literary merit of a high kind in the 
plays of the elder Colman, of Mrs Cowley, or of Cumberland. At 
the beginning of the time, however, appeared the comedies of Gold- 
smith, abounding (especially " She Stoops to Conquer") in humour, 
variety of characterization, and lively and harmless gaiety. Later 
comes Sheridan, with his unintermitted fu-e of epigrammatic witti- 
cisms, his keen insight into the follies and weaknesses of society, 
and his great ingenuity in inventing whimsical situations : qualities 
which entitle him to be compared, in respect of literary skill, with 
the comic writers of Congreve's time ; while his moral tone, though 
far from being actually impure, deserves no positive commendation. 



THE POETHY OP GOLDSMITH. 355 

Of the "Writers of Verse in the time of Johnson's old age, Gold- 
smith alone has achieved immortality. " The Traveller" and " The 
Deserted Village" cannot be forgotten, until the English tongue 
shall have ceased to be understood. A pleasing poet, not a great 
one, he was nevertheless greater than he or his friends knew. An 
indescribable charm pervades those beautiful pieces of poetical de- 
scription and reflection, so musical in versification, so vividly nat- 
ural in scenery, so gently touching in sentiment. Both of them 
were valued, in then- own day, not for their poetical excellence only, 
but for the principles which they maintained in regard to the or- 
ganization of society. It is a fact not to be overlooked, by those 
who assign a high rank to the didactic functions of the poet, that 
Goldsmith did his best to teach a false political economy, while 
Adam Smith was writing " The Wealth of Nations." * 

* OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
From " The Deserted Village." 

In all my wanderings round this world of care, 
In all my griefs — and God has given my share — 
* I still had hopes my latest years to crown, 

Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down ; 
To husband out life's taper at the close, 
And keep the flame from wasting by repose. 
I still had hopes, (for pride attends us still), 
Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill ; 
Around my fire an evening group to draw. 
And tell of all I felt and all I saw. 

And, as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue, 
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew, 
I still had hopes, my long vexations past. 
Here to return — and die at home at last 1 

Oh blest retirement ! friend to life's decline ! 
Eetreat from care, that never must be mine ! 
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these, 
A youth of labour with an age of ease ; 
Who quits a world where strong temptations try. 
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly ! 

For him no wretch is born to work and weep, 
Explore the mine or tempt the dangerous deep : 
No surly porter stands in guilty state. 
To spurn imploring Famine from the gate. 
But on he moves to meet his latter end. 
Angels around befriending virtue's friend ; 
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay, 
While Eesignation gently slopes the way ; 
And, all his prospects brightening to the last. 
His Heaven commences ere the world be past ! 



356 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

9. The foundations of a new poetical school were already laid. 
Percy's Collection of Keliques was published between Goldsmith's 
two poems : and, a little earlier, Macpherson had electrified the re- 
public of letters by " Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem." The atten- 
tion bestowed, not altogether unworthily, on his Ossianic fragments, 
was a hopeful symptom : so were the attempts made, though mainly 
for political reasons, to push iato fame the elegant but cold Epics 
of Glover, The seed was sown : but it was long in vegetating. In 
our own day we still encounter, though not very often, verses of 
some of the minor poets : such as Armstrong, Smollett, Langhorne, 
Warton, and Mason ; or Bruce, Logan, and Fergusson. Hoole trans- 
lated Tasso and Ariosto very tamely from the Italian ; whUe the 
Portuguese poet Camoens was rendered by Mickle with spirit but 
incorrectness. Some light poetical pieces of our own time, especially 
satires of Moore, have been modelled on the comic rhymes of Anstey. 

The short career of the unhappy Chatterton held out wonderful 
promise, both of genius, and of the employment of it in a worthy 
sphere. But, when we enter "The Botanic Garden" of Darwin, 
we find that we have been enticed back into the wUderness of 
didactic verse : while this masterly versifier exemplifies also, almost 
everywhere, one of the most common of poetical errors ; namely, 
the attempt to make poetry describe minutely the sensible appear- 
ances of corporeal objects, instead of being content with com- 
municating the feelings which those objects awaken, 
i. 1735.) Beattie's "Minstrel" presents a marked and agreeable 
d. 1803. j contrast to Darwin. It is the outpouring of a mind exqui- 
sitely poetical in feeling, and instinctively true to the just methods 
of poetical representation. Many of his descriptions are most viv- 
idly suggestive ; although his strength lies, not so much in illus- 
trating external objects by describing the emotions which they 
cause, as in the converse process of illustrating mental phenomena 
by touches of external scenery. Indeed, his deficiency in keen ob- 
servation of the material world is one of the points in which he falls 
short of Goldsmith : and another is his want of that dramatic power, 
by which a poet becomes qualified to represent the characters and 
sentiments of others. The Minstrel is a kind of autobiography, an 
analytic narrative of the early growth of a poet's mind and heart. 
Taken all in all, it is one of the most delightful poems in our 
language.* 

* JAMES BEATTIE. 
From " The Minstrel : " Booh First. 
Then grieve not, thou, to whom th' indulgent Muss 
Vouchsafes a portion of celestial fire : 



THE POETRY OF COWPER. 357 

10. The poetical annals of our period, opening with Oliver Gold- 
smith, close with William Cowper and Robert Bm'ns. 
b. 1731.) The unequalled popularity, gained and still preserved by 
d.isoo.j' Cowper's poems, is owing to several causes, besides the 
favour which, in the rarity of good religious poetry, is so readily 
extended to all productions of that class showing either power or 
promise. The most powerful of these causes is, doubtless, their 
genuine force and originahty of poetical portraiture. The character- 
istic featm*es which distinguish this remarkable writer from his recent 
predecessors are two. Refusing to confine himself to that digni- 
fied and elaborate diction which had become habitual m English 
verse, he unliesitatingiy made poetry use, always when it was con- 
venient, the famihar speech of common conversation. He showed 
yet greater boldness, by seeking to interest his readers in the scenes 
and relations of every-day life, and in those objects of reflection 
which are most strikmgly real. Yet his language is often vulgar, 
and not least so when his theme is most sublime ; and his most suc- 
cessful passages, his minutely touched descriptions of familiar still- 
life and rural scenery, are mdeed strongly suggestive, but have Httle 
of the delicate susceptibility of beauty which breathes through 
Thomson's musings on natm'e. Wordsworth, who knew well the 
importance of classifications of kind, as indicating the particular 
aim of a poem, and thus modifying all its elements, experienced 
not a httle difficulty in determining the genus to which should be 
assigned Cowper's masterpiece, " The Task." He regards it as 
standing, along with " The Night-Thoughts," in a composite class, 
combining the Philosophical Sathe, the Didactic Poem, and the 
Idyl or poem of description and reflection. The poet's para- 

Nor blame the partial Fates, if they refuse 
Th' imperial banquet and the rich attire : 
Know thine own worth, and reverence the lyi*e ! 

Wilt thou debase the heart which God refined ? 
No ! let thy Heaven-taught soul to Heaven aspire, 

To fancy, freedom, harmony, resign'd ; 
Ambition's grovelling crew for ever left behind I 

Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store 

Of charms which Nature to her votary yields ! 
The warbling Avoodlands, the resounding shore, 

The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields ; 

All that the genial ray of morning gilds, 
And all that echoes to the song of even ; 

All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields, 
And all the dread magnificence of heaven ; 
Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven I 



358 LAST AGE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

mount aim, in that work as elsewhere, is perhaps didactic : and 
he often delights us most by exciting trains of thought and feel- 
ing, which are not in any just sense poetical. This tendency 
being united with his idiomatic plainness of style, we seem often as 
if we were listening to an observant, thoughtful, and imaginative 
speaker, who now argues and comments in sensible prose, and now 
breaks out mto snatches of striking and poetical verse. Yet, in 
spite of these things, in spite of the frequent clumsiness of the 
satu-e, and the painful impression caused by the gloom which some- 
times darkens the devout rapture, the effect is such as only a 
genuine poet could have produced.* 

Perhaps it may be merely an eccentricity of taste, that here 
suggests a protest on behalf of our poet's neglected version of 
Homer in blank verse. His Iliad, it must be allowed, if it has the 
simplicity of the original, wants its warlike fervour ; but we cannot 

* WILLIAM COWPER. 
From " Tlie Winter Walk at Noon.'''' 

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds ; 
And, as the mind is pitch 'd, the ear is pleased 
"With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave : 
Some chord in unison with what we hear 
Is touch 'd within us ; and the heart replies. 
How soft the music of those village hells, 
Falling at intervals upon the ear 
In cadence sweet, now dying all away ; 
Now pealing loud again, and louder still, 
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on ! 

With easy force it opens all the cells 
Where Memory slept. Wherever I have heard 
A kindred melody, the scene recurs. 
And with it all its pleasures and its pains. 

The night was winter in his roughest mood, 
The morning sharp and clear. But now, at noon, 
Upon the southern side of the slant hills, 
And where the woods fence off the northern blast. 
The season smiles, resigning all its rage, 
And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue 
Without a cloud ; and white without a speck 
The dazzling splendour of the scene below. 

Again the harmony comes o'er the vale 
And through the trees I view th' emhattled tower, 
Whence all the music. I again perceive 
The soothing influence of the wafted strains ; 
And settle in soft musings, as I tread 
The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms, 
Whose outspread branches overarch the glade. 



THE POETRY OP BURNS. . 359 

help thinking that the romantic adventures of the Odyssey, anS^- 
above all, its descriptions of scenery, are rendered with exceeding 
felicity of poetic effect. 

Our estimate of Cowper's poems is inevitably heightened by our 
love and pity for the poet, writing, not for fame, but for consola- 
tion, and uttering, from the depths of a half-broken heart, his 
reverent homage to the power of religious truth. Our affection 
will not be colder, and our compassion is tenfold more profound, 
h. 1759. ) when we contemplate the agitated and erring life of Robert 
d. 1796. j Burns. Shutting our eyes to everything in his works that 
is unworthy of him, and proud to know that in the rest a Scottish 
peasant has given to the literature bf the Anglo-Saxon race some of 
its most precious jewels, we yet cannot but feel, that all which this 
extraordinary man achieved was earnest of what he might have done, 
rather than performance adequate to the power and the vast variety 
of his endowments. His Songs have entranced readers who were at 
first repelled by their dialect ; and it is on these that his fame rests 
most firmly. No lyrics in any tongue have a more wonderful union 
of thrilling passion, melting tenderness, concentrated expressiveness 
of language, and apt and natural poetic fancy. But neither the 
song, nor any of the higher kinds of lyrical verse, could have given 
scope for other qualities which he has elsewhere shown : his aptness 
in seizing and representing the phases of human character; his 
genial breadth and keenness of humour ; and the strength of creative 
imagination with which he rises into the regions of the allegoric 
and supernatural. The strange tale of " Tam o' Shanter " is the 
assay-piece of a poet, who, if born under a more benignant star, 
might perhaps have been a second Chaucer. 



360 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

SECTION FIRST : THE CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 

A. D. 1800— A. D. 1852. 

1. Greneral Character of the Last Fifty Years — Two Ages embraced in the 
Period. — 2. The First Age — Its Poetry — Its Poetical Eminence and Char- 
acteristics. — 3. The First Age — Its Prose — Novels — The Reviews and 
other Periodicals — Variety of its Productions. — 4. Foreign Impulses 
affecting the whole Period. — 5. The Second Age — Its Mixed Character 
— Its Social Aspects. 

1. The Nineteenth Century is, naturally, for us, more interesting 
than any other period in English Literature : and, among all of 
them, there is perhaps none which will receive more curious atten- 
tion from literary students, hereafter, than the fifty years of it 
that have already elapsed. 

The intellectual character of the time is so novel as weU as so 
various, as to be in itself peculiarly difficult of analysis : and we, 
whose minds have been moulded on its lessoas, are not favourably 
placed, either for comprehending it profoundly, or for impartially 
estimating the value of the monuments it has produced. 

Unquestionably it has been, and is, a time of extraordinary men- 
tal activity ; and that, too, not only exerted by men of very uncom- 
mon endowments, but diffusing itself more widely than ever before 
throughout the nation at large. While books have been multiplied 
beyond precedent, readers have become more numerous in a pro- 
portion yet greater ; and the diffusion of general enlightenment has 
been aimed at, not less zealously than the discovery of new truths. 
The critical and questioning temper, which cannot but reign in a 
state of society like ours, has been guided by an eager warmth very 
unlike to the tendency of the eighteenth centmy : nor is it less 
encouraging to observe, how the increasing animation of spii'it has 
arisen out of an increasing inclination among literary men to inter- 



THE CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 361 

ost themselves, though not always wisely, in important social pro- 
blems. While no other time since the birth of our nation has 
exhibited so surprising a variety in the kinds of literature culti- 
vated, none has been distinguished so honourably by the prevalence 
of enlightened and philanthropic sentiment, and none has accumu- 
lated so plentifully knowledge that is good for man. 

The literary merit of our time is another question. It is a ques- 
tion which we have no reason to be ashamed of meeting : but, iq 
the only answer that can as yet be risked, the half-century may 
most correctly be regarded as presenting two successive and dissim- 
ilar stages. 

The first of these is by far the more brilliant of the two. To it 
belong not a few men of remarkable genius, who have departed long 
ago or recently, and some who, in honom-ed old-age, are still present 
among us. The train of public events, and the details of literary 
progress, concur in making it convenient to regard this opening epoch 
of the centmy as embracing its earliest thirty years. The animation 
and energy which characterized it, arose from the universal exci- 
tation of feeling, and the mighty collision of opinions, which broke 
out over all Em-ope with the first French Eevolution; and the 
intellectual force of thinking men was kept alive by the fierce 
struggle which om- nation maintained so long, almost single-handed, 
against the universal despotism that had taken root on the Conti- 
nent. The strength of that age was greatest in poetry : but it 
gave bu'th, also, to much of valuable though not very profound 
speculation, and to still more of eloquent writing. 

The particular survey to which we shall unmediately submit this 
Fu'st Age in the century, will be the more satisfactory if we have 
previously glanced at some of its most prominent literary character- 
istics, taking, in succession, its poetry and its prose. 

2. The Poetical Literature of that time has no parallel in oiu- 
history, unless in a period scarcely longer, extending before and 
after the beginning of the seventeenth century. And the most 
cautious as weU as competent critic of our day has said, setting 
aside the old drama, that " any comparison of the Elizabethan 
poetry, save Spenser's alone, with that of the nineteenth century, 
would show an extravagant predilection for the mere name or dress 
of antiquity.'* Nor, when we turn to the dramatic works of Shak- 
speare and his contemporaries, does it seem rash to claim a place 
as high as that of any of the minor dramatists, for the vigorous 
poets of our recent time. W e are, surely, quite safe in believing, 
that the lovers of our poetical literature, when they have ranged 
over all its treasures, will find their richest stores of delight, after 



362 THE NINETEENTH GENTUKY. 

Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, in the dramatic group 
which is headed by Fletcher and Jonson, and in the modern one 
in which are found, and not unaccompanied, Coleridge and Words- 
worth, Scott and Byron. Exact comparison of the two groups is 
impossible ; and, if it could be instituted, it woidd be uninstructive. 
But, while most of the moderns we are considering stand morally 
much higher than our dramatic ancients, it is no more than an act 
of justice to our own times, to bear in mind this fact ; that both 
of the illustrious bands excel more in originality of genius than in 
skill or perfection of execution. 

The fact just noted, however, is a feature to be especially remem- 
bered as marking almost the whole of our recent poetry. Most of 
the poets not only neglect polishing 'm diction or melody, but are 
equally inattentive to symmetry of plan. Much of this may have 
been caused by the reaction which took place against the cold 
elaboration of the preceding century : in part, also, it may be attri- 
buted to the spirited vehemence of excitement, from which the 
\vTiters inhaled so much of their strength. But the want of that 
deliberate mastery, which only can generate perfection in art, is 
common to the most reflective with the most passionate of them. 
Byron, in his sketches of tales, poured out in ceaseless succession, 
is not more deficient in skill as an artist, than Wordsworth in his 
Excursion, the huge fragment of an unmanageable design cherished 
throughout a long and thoughtful lifetune. 

Another feature is this ; that the poems which made the strongest 
impression were of the Narrative kind. That and the Drama, in- 
deed, may be said to be the only forms of poetic representation 
adequate either to embody the spirit, or extensively to interest the 
sympathies, of an age and nation immersed in the turmoil of ener- 
getic action. Why the drama has of late been written rarely and 
with small effect, is a question too difficult for us. But we may 
ask ourselves what the poetry of Scott or Byron might probably 
have been, in form as well as in matter, if they had been born under 
the literary supremacy of Samuel Johnson ; remembering, at the 
same tune, what it was they did perform, living in the agitated 
era of Napoleon. On the other hand, we must not overlook the 
position of Wordsworth. He, unitmg in an unusual degree the 
poetic faculty with the love of reflection, but possessing very little 
power of representing the complication and hurry of human action 
and character, indulges his didactic inclination everywhere, and 
not least when the form of his pieces is other than didactic. His 
most valuable works are lessons in philosophy, as well as galleries 
of poetical pictures. Nor should it either be forgotten, or imputed 



THE CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 363 

h,s an inexcusable fault to the contemporaries of his early life, that 
the hearers whom he then persuaded to Ksten to him, were, though 
fit, yet very few. 

3. Amongst the innumerable Prose Writmgs of our first age, 
various in the extreme both in form and in matter, there were two 
kinds of composition which employed a larger fund of literary genius 
than any other, and exercised a wider influence. These were the 
Novels and Komances, and the Reviews and other Periodicals. 

The Novel- writing was a phenomenon very curious, not only for 
the unusually high rank it acquired in the world of letters, chiefly 
through its greatest master, but also for the improved character 
which was imprinted on it. It is a fact not without significance, 
that the novel, which is really a mongrel species of poetry, was, 
after a long declension, raised into reputation by a distinguished 
poet, who turned to it after he had become wearied of treading the 
purer and more ambitious walks of his art. Indeed, the series of 
Scott's novels and romances did not open, until all the best poetry 
of his time had been produced : and, notwithstanding the extraordi- 
nary merit of those new effort^- i)f his, their appearance, and the 
eagerness with which the example was emulated, might be ac- 
cepted as tokens that the poetical light of the age was in its wane. 
By him above all, with two or three precursors and several not 
unworthy successors, the novel was made to be for us, in some re- 
spects almost all, in others more than all, that the drama in its 
palmy summer had been for our forefathers ; imbibing as much of 
the poetic spirit as its prose form and mixed purpose allowed ; 
and aiming, in all the best instances, at presenting a picture, alike 
faithful to nature, and manly and thoughtful in its views of human 
life. 

In the beginning of the present century was founded the dynasty 
of the Reviews. These receptacles of miscellaneous discussion, 
though they had employed skilful pens for fifty years before, had 
been treated merely as task- work by their concoctors. They now 
began to be chosen by preference, as the vehicles of the best prose 
writing, and the most energetic thinking, which the nation could 
command. It is surprising to mark what masses of valuable know- 
ledge have been laid up, what streams of eloquence have been 
poured out, in the periodicals of our century, by authors who, in- 
stead of caring for so much as present notoriety, have oftenest left 
their names to be guessed at. The best writers of the time, with 
hardly an exception, have given us many such anonymous papers ; 
and there are several whose services, no mean ones either, have 
hardly been rendered in any other shape. Our periodical . writers 



364 THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

have not escaped without hurt, though some of them with less 
than might have been expected, from either of two risks, to which 
this way of communication is imminently exposed. First, it is un- 
favourable both to completeness and to depth of knowledge. The 
patient meditation of the sage will hardly be expected to show itself, 
in these hasty effusions on topics which are often quite temporary. 
Yet it is Avith surprise that we read in the leading periodicals, not 
only much that is ingenious and novel, but a very great deal which 
is far from being shallow, and not a little that is really profound. 
Secondly, periodical writing tempts strongly to exaggeration, both 
of style and of sentiment. Something of this is perceptible among 
our very best writers who have been much accustomed to the 
making up of strikmg papers in reviews and magazines : and the 
evil has worked on the mass of inferior contributors, with a force 
which has seriously injured the purity of the public taste. 

It would be impossible, within any reasonable bounds, to name 
all the departments of knowledge to which contributions have been 
made by our periodical writers. No field has been left untouched ; 
and many have been cultivated with great success. But it cannot 
be doubted that the strong points have been two : the Criticism of 
Literary Works, especially poetry ; and speculation in Social and 
Political Philosophy. Treated well in some separate books, these 
have nowhere been handled so skilfully as in the Eeviews. They 
are, after poetry, the most valuable departments in the literature of 
our first age. 

4. It is a fact which we have not overlooked in the progress of 
our studies, that, in no period since the Anglo-Saxon, has our 
national literature failed to derive much, both of its materials and 
of its inspiration, from the teaching of other countries. France, 
which manned the advanced guard of civilisation in the middle 
ages, furnished then, as we have learned, the models of our chival- 
rous poetry, with much of our social system. The Augustan age of 
French letters, again, that is, the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, 
ruled our literary tastes from the Kestoration tiU the middle of the 
eighteenth century. 

From Germany, much more than from any other foreign nation, 
have come the influences by which the intellect of Great Britain 
has been affected during the century we live in. But, in regard to 
its first age, the amount of that influence is sometimes overrated. 
There is no good reason for supposing that the poetry of that tune 
was at aU essentially indebted to such sources. Scott, knowing 
reaUy little about German poetry, and merely borrowing one or 
two ideas from Goethe, was of a spirit totally alien to that of the 



THE CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD. 365 

meditative Teutons ; which, however, did work on Coleridge 
strongly, on Wordsworth in some degree, and much more (through 
them) on one or two of the younger poets. But in poetry the 
effects were really trifling : and it was only after the first twenty 
years of the century, that Glerman literature began to be known 
to any but a very few recluse and uninfluential scholars. 

The case has been widely different during the thirty years which 
lie .nearest to ourselves. The study and translation of the literature 
of Germany have become fashionable pursuits : our poems bear 
unequivocal symptoms of the epidemic ; and the semi-philosophy of 
our magazines is full of it. With all this, it has been, on the whole, 
highly beneficial, especially in familiarizing us with a national cast 
of mind which is strikingly unlike ours, and which therefore is fit, 
if rightly used, to show us where lie our national weaknesses. The 
philology of Germany has taught us very much : its poetical criti- 
cism, far more profound than ours, may, when we have learned to 
understand it, teach us still more. The philosophical stamp which 
has sunk so deeply into the theology of Germany, has engaged the 
anxious attention of our teachers of religion, working effects, both 
for evil and for good, which it would be rash in this place to attempt 
to estimate. Not altogether without its risks, yet decidedly tend- 
ing to elevate the standard of abstract speculation among us, has 
been that accurate study of the highest branches of German philo- 
sophy, which has been prosecuted by a few of om- most systematic 
thinkers, in paths not leadmg directly to theological conclusions. 

5. The circumstances last noted have already led us to take 
account of the Second of the Stages, into which the present century 
has been divided. It has now endured for twenty-two years. 

The hesitation which every one must feel in endeavouring to esti- 
mate the literary character of the generation immediately before his 
own, becomes more decided when we pass to that in the midst of 
which we live. From the particulars which will soon be given, 
readers may form, each for himself, some opinion as to the merit and 
probable effects of the intellectual exertions that are going on so 
actively around us. Very few suggestions can safely be offered 
here, in anticipation of the judgments which will thus be arrived at. 

By far the most hopeful symptom, which our most recent literature 
has shown, is to be found in the zeal and success with which its 
teaching has been extended beyond the accustomed limits. Know- 
ledge, though still leaving unvisited many regions that are alarm- 
ingly dark, has been diffused with a rapidity never before dreamt 
of : the sphere of letters lias been widened, beneficially in respect of 
clearness if not in respect of profundity, by the consideration which 



366 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

has been had of the widening circle of persons to be instructed : and 
the spirit which prompts the lessons has, in many instances, been 
worthily embodied in the enlarged and enlightened temper with 
which they have been communicated. In the midst of much light- 
mindedness and error, and in spite of eager discussions, alike on 
questions religious, ecclesiastical, and social, we may persuade our- 
selves that many features are prominent, presaging the birth of a 
love of mankind more expansive and generous than any that has 
ever yet pervaded society. 

We possess no poetry comparable to that of the last generation ; 
and, with a vast quantity of prose-wiiting that may not unreason- 
ably be called eloquent, we have very few men that remarkably 
unite eloquence with power of thought. Among our thinkers 
there is, beyond doubt, a greater activity of speculation, in regard 
to questions affecting the nature and destiny of man, than that 
which prevailed in the preceding section of the century : but, with 
rare exceptions, the service done has been rather that of boldly 
propounding problems which it is desirable to solve, than that of 
finding true and available solutions. We are struggling, amidst 
much of doubt and dimness, towards a new organization of social 
and intellectual life. 

When we view the eager spirit of questioning, the unassuaged 
thirst for action, by which society is ruled, our contemplation 
of the scene cannot be put to better profit than m the humble 
thankfulness with which it prompts us to remember, that, among 
us, more favoured than many of our brethren, those restless impulses 
have never yet been permitted to destroy social quiet, or to 
drown the peaceful voice mth which Literature speaks, as the wor- 
thiest organ of human thought and desire and will. The novel 
ideas and aspirations, which resound through Europe, like the blast 
of a trumpet summoning all men to battle, have in om- land been so 
guided, by higher power than om's, as to seek their development by 
no force but that of honest conviction, through no agency but that 
of unfettered writing and speech. We, like our fathers, gazing 
with deep anxiety, have gazed also with unbroken safety, on that 
wild conflict of opinions, which elsewhere has overthrown, again and 
again, thrones, and liberty, and faith. The tempest has, as we 
may venture to believe, cleared away some dangerous elements from 
the air we breathe ; and the bolt which was charged with its terrors 
has fallen on other homes than ours. 



THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 367 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION SECOND : THE POETRY OF THE FIRST AGE. 

A, D. 1800— A. D. 1830. 

George III 1800-1820. 

George lY 1820-1830. 

1. Fii*st Group of Leading Poets — Campbell. — 2. Soutliey. — 3. Second 
Group — Scott and Byron. — 4. Scott's Characteristics and "Works. — 5. 
Byron's Characteristics, Ethical and Poetical. — 6. Third Group — Coleridge 
and "Wordsworth — Coleridge's Genius and "Works. — 7. "Wordsworth — Fea- 
tures of his Poetical Character. — 8. "Wordsworth — His Poetical Theory — 
Its Effect on his Works.— 9. Fourth Group— "WUson— Shelley — Keats.— 
10. Crabbe and Moore — Dramatic Poems — Miscellaneous Names — Sacred 
Poetry. 

1. In the illnstrious band of poets, who enriched the literature of 
our language durmg the first generation of the present century, 
there are four who have gained greater fame than any others, and 
exercised greater influence on their contemporaries. These are, 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron ; and they, although 
each is individually unlike all the rest, might yet, in respect of their 
ruling spu-it and tendencies, be classed in paks as they have now 
been named. Others, however, are hardly less distinguished : and 
aU whose works call for exact scrutiny may conveniently be distri- 
buted in Four Grroups. 

In the first of these stand Thomas Campbell and Eobert Southey, 
writers very dissimilar to each other, but differing as widely from 
all their contemporaries. 

b. 1777. > We should hardly expect that the character of Campbell's 
d, 184:4:. j -works would have been other than it is, though he had 
begim his career thirty y(!ars earlier. His larger poems would have 
delighted all who loved the few pieces truly poetical which that 
time produced. But to no one living then, would it have occurred 
to hail him as the precursor of a new school ; and no one living now 
would have wondered to see such compositions as his, succeeding 



368 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

or accompanying those of Goldsmith and Gray. He employed, as 
they did, an unusually delicate taste, in elaborating his verses, both 
in diction and melody, with the minute care of execution which had 
been an orthodox requirement since the days of Queen Anne ; and 
to the descriptive poems of the former of the two his earliest and 
best work bore a likeness in tone, though it was more vigorous 
in fancy and less so in reflection. In narrative, Campbell is, at 
the best, slow and unimpressive : quick sympathy with energetic 
action is scarcely traceable, unless in the flashes of enthusiasm 
which light up his martial odes ; and even of these fine lyrics 
there is not one, perhaps, into which there does not intrude some 
heavy or feeble phrase, a token that the flame is flickering and 
growing dim. 

It is a fact not without a meaning, that, while his " Pleasures of 
Hope " was written between youth and manhood, the " Gertrude 
of Wyoming," the latest of his productions that is worthy of him, 
had appeared before he was much past his thirtieth year. The 
reason may suggest itself if we remember, on how slender a thread of 
original or coherent thinkmg are strung the jewels of fancy and 
feeling, that make the charm of the earlier, which is also by much the 
more vigorous, of the two poems. Not only does it fail to redeem 
the promise of its title ; but its beautiful descriptions, and its reflec- 
tions and sentiments, (often deeply touching, but as often very trite,) 
are related to each other by no unity of purpose, or by none but 
such as depends on the most casual and indistinct associations. His 
mind, deficient in manly vigour of thought, had worked itself out in 
the first few bursts of youthful emotion. But no one has clothed, 
with more of romantic sweetness, the feelings and fancies which 
people the fairy-land of early dreams ; and no one has thrown 
around the enchanted region a purer atmosphere of moral contem- 
plation. 

h. 1774.") 2. Southey, with an ethical tone higher and sterner than 
d. 1843. J Campbell's, ofiers in every other feature a marked contrast 
to him. He is rough and careless in working up details : he in- 
dulges in no poetical reveries, and scorns everything approaching 
to sentimentalism : he throws off rapid sketches of human action, 
embellished with great pomp of external imagery, interesting through 
grandeur and seriousness of feeling, and seldom touching the key of 
the pathetic. In much of this, he is the man of his own age : but 
he is above his age in one view, in respect of which he has not 
received justice. Writing narrative poetry before any of his cele- 
brated contemporaries had entered the ground, he stood solitary 
among them to the last : the only poet of his day who strove to 



southey's poetry. 369 

emulate the great masters of epic song ; the only one who took pains 
to give his works external symmetry of plan ; the only one who at- 
tempted bestowing on a poem an internal unity, by making it the 
representative of one leading idea. This, it must firmly be main- 
tained, is a loftier and worthier theory of poetic art, than that which 
ruled the irregular outbursts of Scott and Byron. But it may be 
that the aspiration was too ambitious for the time : it was certainly 
far above the competency of the aspirer. The reflective skill of the 
artist was insufficiently supported by the native temperament of the 
poet. Southey wanted spontaneous depth of sympathy : his emo- 
tion has the steady and measured flow of the artificial canal, not the 
leaping gush of the river in its self- worn channel. His imagination, 
likewise, is full and picturesque, rather than original : he could 
elaborate fine images out of objects whose poetical relations are 
obvious ; but he was not gifted with the strong and exquisite sense, 
which discerns poetical elements in things seemingly unpoetical. 

In two of his three best poems, he has imitated his epic models 
in a fashion which cools all but highly imaginative readers. He 
has founded the interest mainly on supernatural agency, and that 
of a kind which not only is obscure to most of us, but cannot com- 
mand so much as a momentary belief of reality. The novelty which 
he desked to gain is purchased at an extravagant price : the splen- 
did panoramas pass away like the figures of a magic lantern. In 
his Arabian tale, " Thalaba the Destroyer," we are placed amidst 
the array of striking superstitions which surrounds the Deism of 
Mahomet : and the scattered rays of truth and goodness, which 
twinkle through the darkness of the false creed, are concentrated in 
a series of scenes, whose moral dignity of thought, and solemn por- 
traiture of conscientious self-sacrifice, cannot fail to impress us 
vividly ; if only we are able to make ourselves at home among the 
witches and talismans, the fallen angels who haunt the ruins of 
Babylon, and the gigantic brood of sorcerers who fill the lurid 
caverns stretching under the roots of the ocean. "■ The Curse of 
Kehama," relating a story yet more touching, and adorned with 
passages of great tenderness, tries us still more severely, by seeking 
to interest us in the monstrous and mischievous fables of the Hindoo 
mythology. The supernatural machinery, and the bold use of the 
lyrical metres, are alike abandoned in the blank- verse epic, " Kode- 
rick, the Last of the Goths." It is much to be regretted that the 
choice of a story, containing circumstances irremediably revolting, 
should deform this noble poem, which is otherwise the fairest proof 
tlie author has given of the practicability of his enlightened poetic 
theory, 

q2 



370 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

3. Our second group of poets will, (unless Moore ought to find a 
place in it,) contain only Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, who 
were in succession the most popular of all, and owed their popularity 
mainly to characteristics which they had in common. 

They are distinctively the poets of active life. They portray, 
in spirited narrative, idealized resemblances of the scenes of reahty ; 
events which arise out of the universal relations of society, hopes 
and fears and wishes which are open to the consciousness of all 
mankind. Were it not for some higher flights which Byron took, 
inspired from without rather than from within, we might say of 
them, without exception^ what is true of him generally ; that they 
neither aspired to the praise of wedding poetry with abstract 
thought, nor ascended into those secluded walks of fanciful musing, 
in which none delight but minds very finely toned. 

Both of them have described some of their works as tales ; and 
it has been said of Scott, while it might with not less truth have 
been said of Byron, that his works are romances in verse. It is 
unquestionable, that they have neither the elevation nor the regu- 
larity belonging to the highest kind of narrative poetry ; and, while 
the poems of the one are in many points strikingly analogous to his 
own historical novels, those of the other often derive their popular 
attractiveness from sources of interest nearly akin to that which 
prevails in less worthy works of fiction. 

But the model of both poets was something difierent fi"om the 
regular epic ; and, if there must be a comparison, the standard is 
to be sought elsewhere. Scott, fondly attached to the early litera- 
ture of the land, began his authorship, in " The Minstrelsy of the 
Scottish Border," with the republication and imitation of ancient 
ballads ; and he avowedly designed liis poems as restorations, with 
changes suited to modern tastes, of a very interesting class of 
poems with which he was not less familiar. His originals were the 
Romances of Chivalry ; and, after the extraordinary success of his 
attempts at embodying the chivalrous and national idea, nothing 
was more natural than that the example should be applied, by 
Byron as well as by others, in the construction of narratives 
founded on a different kind of sentiments. The likeness to the 
old romances was completed by the adoption of their most usual 
measure, the couplet of lines in eight syllables or four accents. 
This metre, although long in use, had recently been held fit only 
for comic rhyming or lyrics : a poet of Johnson's time would no 
more have thought of using it for a long and serious narrative, 
than of choosing the common measure of the psalms. But it is 
not to be forgotten that the idea of imitating the romances, as 



THE POETRY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. 371 

well as the use of their metre and the accentual way of treating it, 
belongs really to Coleridge, whose " Christabel " was the immediate 
model of Scott's earliest tale. 

It was to be expected, and it was right, that compositions of this 
sort, executed admirably by both writers, should gain extensive 
popularity. It may be that the audience was the larger, because no 
heavy demand was made on them for reflection or fine feeling. 
But the public, in preferring narrative poems to philosophical ones, 
were unwittingly affirming a sound critical principle. On the other 
hand, it was not to be wondered at, though both of the poets them- 
selves flagged and grew weary, in treading again and again so nar- 
row a round. It was in the course of things that Scott, finding in 
his first field no scope for some of his best and strongest powers, 
should turn aside to lavish these without hindrance on his prose 
romances. It was in the course of things that Byron, as his know- 
ledge grew and his meditations became deeper, should rise from 
Turkish tales to the later cantos of Childe Harold. 
6. 1771. ) ^- ^^ ^^^^^ neither rate Scott's originality high enough, 
d. 1832. I nor perceive exactly how it was that his poems became so 
popular, unless we remember that he was the earliest adventurer 
in a region hitherto unknown ; and that, on his first appearance, 
he stood, in the eye of the world at large, quite unaccompanied. 
It was another key that had been struck in " The Pleasures of 
Hope :" " Thalaba" had been published, only to be neglected : and 
" Christabel," though already written, was known but to a few men 
of letters. No note of preparation had been sounded unless by Scott's 
own " Minstrelsy," when, in 1805, he broke in on the public witli 
his series of poetical narratives. In these he appealed to national 
sympathies through ennobling historic recollections; he painted the 
externals of scenery and manners with unrivalled picturesqueness ; he 
embellished with an infectious enthusiasm all that was generous and 
brave in the world of chivalry ; and he seldom forgot to dress out the 
antique in so much of modern trappings, as might make it both intel- 
ligible and interesting. " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," really, as 
he himself called it, " a romance of border- chivalry, in a light-horse- 
man sort of stanza," has not only a more continuous fervour and 
a more consistent unity than its successors, but is more faithful to 
the character of its ancient models : and it is faithful to them with- 
out injury to the interest of the poem with modern readers, in almost 
all points except its use of the supernatural, which is exceedingly 
clumsy. " Marmion" is otherwise designed : it seeks to combine 
the chivalrous romance with the metrical chronicle ; a union neither 
impossible nor without old precedent, but here very far from being 



372 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEEKTH CENTURY, 

well-executed. The blot by whicli tbe work is most deeply defaced, 
was pointed out, on its appearance, in a famous criticism wliicb gave 
much offence to the poet. It lies m the degradation of the nominal 
hero, and iu the every-day and prosaic nature of some of the offences 
he is made to commit. But the poem abounds in very striking 
passages: the battle of Flodden is especially grand. "There is," 
says the author of the critique just referred to, " a flight of five 
or six hundred lines, in which he never stoops his wing or 
wavers in his course ; but carries the reader forward with a 
more rapid, sustained, and lofty movement, than any epic bard 
we can at present remember." * " The Lady of the Lake" is more 
original in conception : it is a kind of romantic pastoral : and a 
good deal of vagueness, both in character and in narrative, is hidden 
from us by the charm of its magnificent landscapes, and the cheer- 
ful au'uiess of the sentiment and adventures. " Eokeby" is a Wav- 
erly novel in verse, without the liveliness, but overflowing with 
couplets poetically pointed : and "The Lord of the Isles" is hardly 
more than a spmted metrical chronicle, deserving, in the circum- 
stances, infinitely less praise than its model, the " Bruce " of Bar- 
bour. It may be through an oddity of taste, that some of us seem 
to perceive a new blazing up of the ancient spirit, in those wild and 
irregular sketches of Scandinavian and chivalrous superstitions, 
which are contained in " Harold the Dauntless" and " The Bridal 
of Triermain." Published anonymously, as the writer's first exper- 
iment of the kind, they were supposed to be imitations, and suffered 
a neglect which confii-med Scott's intention of desertmg composition 
in verse : and the preponderance of the supernatural machinery in 
the stories of both must always prevent them from being generally 
agreeable or interesting. But nowhere does the poet seem more at 
home, than in the romantic scenes which he there painted. 
h. 1788. > ^- '^^® moral faults of Byron's poetry became, unfortu- 
d. 1824. J nately, more glaring as he grew older. Starting with the 
carelessness of ill-trained youth in regard to some of the most seri- 
ous of all truths, he provoked censure without scruple, and was cen- 
sured not without caprice : and thus, being placed speedily in a 
dangerous and false position, he hardened himself into a contempt 
for the most sacred laws of society, or at least made a point 
of professing such contempt in his later writings. The closing 
scenes of his short life give reason for a belief, that purer and more 
elevated views were beginning to dawn on his mmd : but he died 
before the amendment had found its way into his literary efforts. 

* Lord Jeffrey : Contributions to the EdLnburgh Eeview. 



LORD byron's poetry. 873 

His wanton disregard for the distinction between right and wrong 
is nowhere paraded so obtrusively, as in one of his last works, 
which is also the most decisive ^ proof of his genius ; a work, 
indeed, in which his poetical powers appeared not so properly to 
have reached maturity, as to show a new and wider development. 
But his earlier poems themselves, which are in the hands of every 
one, cannot be named to the young without a word of warning. 
From Scott, it is true, we receive no lofty lessons of morality : but 
with him no great law of ethics is set at nought. His brilliant 
rival endeavours assiduously to inculcate lessons which are posi- 
tively bad. The root of his delinquency is laid bare by one of the 
ablest as well as most friendly of his critics. It did not consist in 
his continually choosing for representation scenes of violent passion 
and guilty horror : it lay deeper than in his theatrical fondness 
for identifying himself with his misanthropes, and pirates, and 
seducers. These were ethical faults, as well as poetical errors : but 
he sinned more grievously still, against morality as against possibil- 
ity, by mixing up, incessantly, m one and the same character, the 
utmost extremes of virtue and vice, of generosity and ferocity, of 
lofty heroism and sensual grossness. " It is still worse when he 
proceeds to show, that all these precious gifts, of dauntless courage, 
strong affection, and high imagmation, are not only akin to guilt, 
but the parents of misery ; and that those only have any chance of 
tranquillity or happiness in this world, whom it is the object of his 
poetry to make us shun and despise." * 

Thus equivocal, or worse than equivocal, as a teacher, in his prac- 
tice of an art which cannot but teach indhectly through its excite- 
ment of the imagination, Byron fixes his suggestive pictures with 
an extraordinary impressiveness. Narrow in his range of thought, 
and very often really commonplace in its results; monotonously 
gloomy in his models of character, and never able to pass a step 
beyond the self-drawn circle ; and stooping frequently to seek for 
sources of excitement among the very dregs of hum.an nature : he 
yet, by a rare union of faculties, vindicates his poetic power over 
the very readers who struggle against it. He excelled all the poets 
of his time, beyond the reach of comparison, in impassioned strength, 
varying from vehemence to pathos : he was excelled by very few of 
them in his fine sense of the beautiful : and his combination of pas- 
sion with beauty, standing unapproached in his own day, has hardly 
ever been surpassed. His originality, likewise, is great, though 
attained in an odd v/ay. In his tales he modelled freely after Cole- 

* Loi'd Jeffrey : Contributions to the Edinburgh Keview. 



374 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

ridge and Scott: and it would be difficult to say how very much 
the Pilgrimage owes to "Wordsworth. But he did not borrow as 
the mocking-bii'd, merely repeating the notes ; nor yet as the in- 
ventive musician, who draws out admirable variations from a given 
air : he rather resembles one who watches a few striking movements 
from a half-heard strain of distant music, and constructs on these 
a melody which is all his own. 

His Tales, though they contain some of his most beautiful pas- 
sages, yet, except Parisina and The Prisoner of Chillon, rise seldomer 
than his other poems into that flow of poetic imagery, prompted 
by the loveliness of nature, which he had attempted in the first two 
Cantos of Childe Harold, and poured forth with added fulness of 
thought and emotion in the last two. Manfred, however, with all 
its shortcomings, is perhaps the work wjiich most adequately shows 
his poetical temperament. And the Tragedies, though not worthy 
of the poet, are, of all his works, those which do most honour to 
the man. 

6. We pass to the third section in our honoured file of poets. 
In it are written the names of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Wil- 
liam Wordsworth ; men endowed pre-eminently with the distinctive 
elements of poetry, and communicating to their contemporaries an 
impulse which, sooner or later, was decisively paramoimt. Neither 
of them gained, or used the means of gaining, the general popula- 
rity, which followed Scott's tales of battle and adventure, and 
Byron's melodramatic mysteries. They are characteristically the 
poets of imagination, of reflection, and of a tone of sentiment, which, 
whatever may have been their own aim, owes its attraction to its 
ideal elevation. Admired and emulated by a few zealous students, 
Coleridge may be said to have vktually become the poetical leader 
from the very beginning of his age ; and efiects yet wider have 
since been worked by the extended study of Wordsworth. 
1. 1772. ) We cannot err in regarding Coleridge as the most origi- 
cZ.1834.]" nai among the poets of his very original time : and, with 
all drawbacks, he may as safely be ranked among the most original 
of its thinkers; a fact bearing, at more points than one, on his 
poetical character. The fragmentary lyrical dreams which visited 
him in his happiest moods of inspiration are unequalled in our lan- 
guage, perhaps not equalled in any other, for then* overflowing 
affluence of imagery, so solemnly and deeply meditative, so purely 
and romantically beautiful, and suggesting, with such intensity and 
variety, trains of novel thought and of touching emotion. His most 
frequent tone of feeling is very peculiar, but hardly describable. 
It is a kind of romantic tenderness or melancholy, often solemnized 



THE POEMS OF COLERIDGE AND WORDSWOKTH. 375 

by an intense access of profound a.vre. This fine passion is never 
breathed out so finely, as when it is associated with some of his airy 
glimpses of external nature : in these it colours every one of the 
forms which possessed his teeming fantasy. Nor is his power of 
suggestive sketching more extraordmary than his immaculate taste 
and nervous precision of language. His images are often obscure, 
and as often owe their beauty to the moonlight haze in which they 
float : they are very seldom obscure through faults of diction, and 
never degraded through such faults. 

It would be impossible for any one, except another Coleridge, to 
eay what would have been the character, or what the merit, of any 
great work which Coleridge might have executed. But it is disap- 
pointing to remember that this gifted man did execute nothing more 
than fragments. His life ebbed away in the dangerous happiness of 
contemplating undertakings still to be achieved. His fault was 
hardly to be called indolence, but rather an habitual weakness of 
will. The most powerful of all his works, the romance of " Chris- 
tabel," the prompter both of Scott and of Byron, was thrown aside 
when scarce begun, and stands as an interrupted vision of myste- 
rious adventures and strange horrors, clothed in the most exquisite 
and appropriate fancies. His tragedy of " Remorse" is full of poetic 
pictures, which are very fine, though not so characteristic as many 
others which he designed. In " The Ancient Mariner," if any- 
where, he has learned from Wordsworth, and not to his profit. The 
idea of calling up all its awful pageantry of evil to punish the 
thoughtless slaughter of a bird, teaches, no doubt, a- good moral 
lesson, but involves a puerility which is not redeemed by the foun- 
dation it has in the superstitions of the sailor : and the incongruity 
between the cause and the consequence concurs with the profuse 
introduction of the supernatural, in injuring the effect of this most 
suggestive and original composition. 

If one were condemned to forget all Coleridge's poems except a 
few, there are perhaps three that would best keep in mind the varie- 
ties of his genius. The highly poetical " Ode to the Depai-ting 
Year " shows his force of thought and moral earnestness : " Kubla 
Khan," which is literally the record of a dream,, represents, in its 
gorgeous incoherence, his singular power of lightmg up landscapes 
with thrilling fancies ; and " The Dark Ladye" is one of the most 
tender and romantic love-poems ever framed. 
/a 1770. \ '^' The name of Wordsworth cannot be pronounced with- 
<^.i850.j out an admiration and respect not easily to be chilled, but 
a little apt to be so by the reaction which ensues, w^hen all bounds 
are overleaped by his undiscriminating eulogists. A prodigality of 



376 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

praise, not justly due even to Milton, has been heaped on him during 
the last few years of his life, and ever since. Yet this overdone rever- 
ence for a man of great genius and far-reaching views, a lover of 
mankind, and a reformer in poetical art, is an error of a generous 
and pleasing kind, and might be passed over silently were not the 
seeking after truth a duty in all things. It is a whimsical sequence 
to the neglect and ridicule which he long suffered ; the former 
arising inevitably for a time out of the character of his works, and 
the latter being (it must be said) merited by eccentricities both of 
taste and judgment, such as never perhaps deformed any other 
poems of equal merit. 

The most obvious feature in Wordsworth is the intense and un- 
wearied delight which he takes in all the shapes and appearances 
of rural and mountain scenery. He is carried away by a rapture 
truly passionate, when he broods over the grandeur and loveliness 
of the earth and air : his verse lingers with a fond reluctance to de- 
part, and dwells again with pleased repetition and return, on the 
wild flower, or the misty lake, or the sound of the wailing blast, 
or the gleam of sunshine breaking through the passes among the 
hills : and the thoughts and feelings, for the suggestion of which 
these objects are cherished, flow forth with an abstracted enthusiasm 
of expression, which, in a man less pious and rational, might be in- 
terpreted as a raising of the inanimate world to a level with human 
dignity and intelligence. Many of the analogies involved in such 
descriptions of his, are among the most originally and poetically 
conceived, and the most exquisitely apt in diction, of all metrical pas- 
sages in our language. The tone which prevails, again, in his con- 
templation of mortal act and suffering, is a serene seriousness, on 
which there never breaks in any thing rightly to be called pas- 
sion. Yet it often rises, especially in religious musing, into an in- 
tensely solemn awe, and is not less often relieved by touches of a quiet 
pathos. In learning what are the poet's feelings, we have learned 
what are those of his personages when he introduces any: for, while 
the delineation of character is not the strong point with any of our 
recent poets, none of them, not Byron himself, has had so thorough 
an incapacity as Wordsworth of throwing himself dramatically into 
the conception of characters different from his own. With this un- 
impassioned temperament, and this self-absorbed rigidity, he can- 
not but fail in narrating events with spirit : nothing can be heavier 
than his sustained attempts at narrative, such as those which, in- 
terspersed with fine meditation and fancy, make up the staple in 
" The White Doe of Kylstone." But the attempt is seldom made. 
Almost all his poems might be called, as he has himself called one sec- 



377 

tion of them, " poems of sentiment and reflection." They are lyrical, 
descriptive, or didactic, or a union of the three ; and his own ambi- 
tion was that of being, in all that he did, worthy of being honoured 
as a philosophical poet. Few have so well deserved the name as he 
has, by the labours of a studious and reflective lifetime, devoted with 
conscientious ardour to the service of poetic art, and to the teaching, 
through picture and feeling, of lessons ministering to the happiness 
and virtue of mankind. His unceasing sympathy with the every- 
day interests of life, while it has produced some of his faults, has 
brought out his greatest strength both of thought and of invention : 
and nowhere is be more energetic or more truly poetical, than when 
he is sedulously occupied in obeying his own maxim, that " poetry 
is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts 
and breathes the spirit of religion." 

8. It is not surprising that a man like Wordsworth, living and 
meditating in seclusion, should have constructed his works, or per- 
suaded himself that he constructed them, in obedience to a system- 
atic theory of poetical art. But we might not easily have inferred, 
from the works themselves, what the theory was. He has ven- 
tured on the hazardous step of informing us : and, while a study of 
his declared sesthetical principles is one of the most instructive 
employments in which mature students of literature could engage, 
one or two points require attention from all v/ho would rightly 
estimate his poems. 

Nothing can be better than his leading doctrines, especially the 
law on which he so anxiously insists, that all poetry is laid under 

a necessity of producing immediate pleasure;" or that, as he 
otherwise phrases it, " the end of poetry is to produce excitement 
in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure." This gTeat the- 
orem, although now perhaps it is seldom disputed in words, is yet so 
apt to be misunderstood or forgotten, that it cannot be pondered too 
carefully. The enunciation of it comes with especial force from the 
lips of a philosophical poet, who aimed undeviatingly at causing 
poetry to become, by every method consistent with the observance 
of the primary rule, the instructor and refiner of the noblest faculties 
of man's nature. Not less valuable are the specifications and corol- 
laries with which the central truth is fenced and illustrated. There 
is greater room for controversy in some of those views which were 
first proposed by the writer himself, and to which he was led by a 
just scorn for the endeavours, current among the weaker pupils in 
the school of Pope, to manufacture poetry by mere skill in the choice 
and collocation of words. He was thus tempted, in the furthest 
step of his reasoning, to something not unlike the very equivocal 



378 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

assertion, that the poet's function is limited to an exact representa- 
tion of the natural and real ; a heresy which his own best pieces of 
verse triumphantly refute. In detail, however, he sought to make 
this rule operative by a choice, both of subjects and of diction, 
which, it must reluctantly be confessed, issued too often in nothing 
better than triviality and meanness. This paradoxical opinion of 
his, his grave self-esteem, and the peculiarities of thinking and 
sentiment arising out^of a secluded and meditative life, co-operated 
in making him deliberately present to us many passages, and some 
entire poems, which it is really difficult to read with seriousness. Still 
oftener they gave birth to thoughts and expressions, which, like ec- 
centricities in conduct, seem, iu the mass, absurd to a large majority 
of men; but each of which, when regarded by itself, strikes an 
answering chord in the breasts of many, who share more or less in 
the unusual habit or taste that dictated it. 

It is thus that opinions so diverse have been caused, and the feel- 
ings of different readers so diversely affected, by his early works 
the '■'■ Lyrical Ballads," and by others of the same cast. There is 
hardly one of these, along which there does not glance some bril- 
liant ray of poetic light : but, even in those throughout which 
the ethereal illumination is purest and most steady, shadows flit in- 
trusively across, sometimes offending the eyes of all, at other times 
not perceptible to those who are accustomed to them. It would 
probably be impossible to name any of those smaller poems, which 
would not be pronounced and felt by many readers to possess 
faultless beauty, and by many others to have then- beauty irre- 
trievably marred by some of the characteristic blemishes. It may 
be enough to cite, as instances, the pastoral ballad of '^ The Pet- 
Lamb," the solemn " Thanksgiving Ode," and even " The Thorn." 
The lovely " Ruth " herself, and " The Seven Sisters," do not pass 
uncensured. The three poems on " Yarrow," and some of the 
larger ones, would perhaps be more fortunate, though really less fine : 
and the adoption of the longer forms of metre, such as the ten-syl- 
labled rhymes, or the heroic blank- verse, acts on the poet, almost 
uniformly, as a spell which exorcises all oddity and affectation. 
" Laodamia" and " Dion" are classical gems without a flaw : and many 
of the Sonnets unite original thought, poetic vividness, and symme- 
try of parts, with a perfection hardly to be surpassed. Above aU, 
''The Excursion" rolls on its thousands of blank-verse lines with 
the soul-felt harmony of a divine hymn, pealed forth from a cathe- 
dral-organ. We forget the insignificance and want of interest char- 
acterizing the plan, which embraces nothing but a three days' walk 
among the mountains : we refuse to be aroused from our trance of 



WILSON, SHELLEY, AND KEATS. 379 

meditative pleasure by the occasional tediousness of dissertation : 
and we are startled but for a moment by the poet's repeated de- 
mand on us, to regard this as only one part of a gigantic philosophi- 
cal poem. In that vast undertaking were to be included " The 
Prelude" and the portions unpublished at the time of his death ; 
and the completion of it was superseded only by the incorpo- 
ration of many of its materials in his other works. The Excursion 
abounds in verses and phrases which, once heard, are never for- 
gotten : and it contains not a few long trains of poetical musing, 
through which the poet moves with a majestic fulness of reflection 
and imagination, not paralleled, by very far, in any thing else of 
which our century can boast. 

9. John Wilson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, make 
up our fourth poetical group. They are placed together as bearing, 
in essentials, a likeness to Coleridge and Wordsworth rather than 
to others. 

h. 1788. The poetry of Professor Wilson is in its substance the voice 
of imagination and sentiment, with an under-current of reflection, 
which seems as if it were kept down by an apprehensive intuition of 
its possible incongruity with the elements that are predominant. In 
form, his principal works depart from that to which he might have 
been expected to incline. "The Isle of Palms" is a narrative 
romance of shipwreck and island-solitude, full of rich pictures and 
delicate pathos, and treating the short stanza of Coleridge and 
Scott with very ingenious varieties of melody. "The City of 
the Plague " is a series of dramatic scenes, representing, with very 
great depth of emotion, a domestic tragedy from the Plague of Lon- 
don. Both in the warm love of nature, and in the ruling tone of 
feeling, Wilson is more like to Wordsworth than to any other of his 
contemporaries : but no poet ever admired another with such rever- 
ence, yet imitated him so very little. There prevail, everywhere, an 
airiness and delicacy of conception which are very fascinating ; and 
the tender sweetness of expression is often wonderfully touching. 
Everywhere there arises the impression that these works, the effu- 
sions of early manhood, were imperfect embodiments of a strength 
that lurked within, and which might yet, like the hidden endow- 
ments of Scott, find in prose a freer outlet. 

It is sad, though not equally sad, to contemplate the fate of the 
other two who have been named. Shelley, the victim of a way- 
ward perverseness contrasting painfully with his natural gentle- 
ness of disposition, fancied himself an Atheist in his seventeenth 
year, and made himself a martyr to a chimera, through which he 
insisted on wanting such companionship and teaching as would 



380 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

have fortified and enlightened alike his moral being and his intel- 
lect. Keats poured forth with extraordinary power the dreams of 
his immature youth, and died with the belief that the radiant forms 
had been seen in vain. In native felicity of poetic endowment, em- 
bracing both wealth of imagmation and warmth of susceptibility to the 
beautiful, it is hardly too much to say that these two were the first 
minds of their time. But the inadequacy of their performance to 
their poetic faculties shows, as strikmgly as any thing could, how 
needful, towards the production of effective poetry, is a substratum 
of solid thought, of practical sense, and of manly and extensive sym- 
pathy. 

b. 1792. > Never did any man revel more than Shelley in the warm 
d. 1822. J transports of true poetic vision. If we would readily appre- 
hend the fulness and fineness of his powers, without remaining 
ignorant of his weakness, we might study either of two pieces : the 
lyrical drama " Prometheus Unbound," a marvellous gallery of 
dazzling images and wildly touching sentiments ; or the " Alastor," 
a scene in which the melancholy quiet of solitude is visited but by 
the despairing poet who lies down to die. We want, everywhere, 
two requisites of poetry really good. We want sympathy with 
ordinary and universal feelings ; instead of which we find warmth 
seldom shown but for the unreal or the abstract, or when the poet's 
own unrest prompts, as in the " Stanzas written near Naples," a 
strain of lamentation which sounds like a passionate sigh. Again, 
we want clearness of thinking, and find, instead of it, an indistinct- 
ness which sometimes amounts to the unintelligible : in his most 
ambitious poem, the narrative called " The Revolt of Islam," it is 
often difficult to apprehend so much as the outline of the story. 
b. 1796. ) It is impossible to say what Keats might have been, had he 
(f.i820.j lived to become rightly acquainted with himself and with 
mankind. But never did any youthful poet exhibit a more thorough 
possession of those faculties that are the foundation on which 
genius rests. It was said of his "Endymion," most truly, that no 
book could more aptly be used as a test, to determine whether a 
reader has a genuine love for poetry : and the intensity of the poetic 
spirit is not less in others of his poems. His works have no interest 
of story, no insight into human nature, no clear sequence of thought, 
no measure either in the colouring or the number of the concep- 
tions : they are the rapturous voice of youthful fancy, luxuriating 
with deep delight in a world of beautiful unrealities. 

10. When we were about to scrutinize the works of the two 
leaders in narrative poetry, a doubt was thrown out in regard to 
the position which should be assigned to Thomas Moore. The 



MOORE AND CRABBE. 381 

h. 1754. 1 name of George Crabbe, likewise, has not yet been com- 
d. 1832.]" memorated. Both of these popular poets stand out promi- 
nently enough to claim particular notice : yet it may be questioned 
whether either of them is entitled to be ranked with those that 
have already been reviewed. If we are positively to receive them 
into the first order of their time, they might not only occupy the 
extrem.es in date, but exemplify some of the strongest contrasts that 
the age presented in respect of poetical character. The former was 
too unreal to be a great poet : the latter failed by attaching himself 
too closely to what was present and actual. Crabbe, begianing his 
career among the^ writers of the eighteenth century, and nearly akin 
to them in many features, might have begun our series. His Metri- 
cal Tales, describing every-day life, are strikingly natural, and some- 
times very touching : but they are elevated by nothing of ideality, 
6.1780.1 ^^^ warmed by no kindling thoughts. Moore, one of the 
d. 1851. 1 most popular of our poets, will, long be remembered for his 
Songs, so melodious, so elegant in phrase, and wedding his grace- 
ful sentiment so skilfully with giittermg pictures. His fund of 
imagery is inexhaustible : but his analogies are oftener ingenious 
than poetical. He might be described, i£ we were to adopt a dis- 
tinction often made of late, as having fancy rather than imagination. 
His Eastern Romances in " Lalla Rookh," ^dth all their occasional 
felicities, are not powerful poetic narratives. Probably he is no- 
where so successful as in his Satmcal effusions of Comic Ehyme : for 
in these his fanciful ideas are prompted by a wit so gaily sharp, 
and expressed with a pointedness and neatness so very unusual, 
that it is a pity these pieces should be condemned to speedy forget- 
fulness, as they must be by the temporary interest of theh topics. 

Over the Minor Poets of that fruitful time, good as some of them 
are, we have not time to linger. Two or three must be hastily 
passed over, who might have deserved greater honour. 

It would have been pleasant to do justice to the Tragedies of 
Joanna BaUlie. These, with all theh faults as plays, are noble ad- 
ditions to our literatm-e, and the closest approach that has been 
made in recent times to the merit of the old English di-ama. After 
these, Coleridge's tragedy havmg already been named, would come 
the stately and imposmg dramatic poems of Mihnan ; Maturin's un- 
passioned " Bertram ; " and the finely conceived " Julian " of Miss 
Mitford. 

Samuel Rogers and William Lisle Bowles have given us much of 
pleasing and reflective sentiment, accompanied with great refinement 
of taste. To another and more modern school belong Bryan Proctor, 
(better known by his assumed name of Barry Cornwall,) and Leigh 



382 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

Himt : the former the purer in taste, the latter the more original and 
inventive ; and both the authors of interesting and romantic poems. 
Walter Savage Landor could not be understood or fairly estimated 
without much detail. Some of his, short lyrical and meditative 
pieces are very beautiful : his larger poems, both " Gebir," the 
" Hellenics," and the Dramas, sometimes delight but oftener puzzle 
us, by their occasional happiness of fancy and expression, their pre- 
valent obscurity of thought, and their extraordinary want of con- 
structive skUl. The poems of Mrs Hemans breathe a singularly 
attractive tone of romantic and melancholy sweetness ; and, them- 
selves owing large obligations to minds of gi'eater originahty, they 
have in their turn become the models, in sentiment, in phraseology, 
and m rhythm, for an incalculable number of pleasing sentimental 
verses. The ballads and songs of Hogg and Cunningham, some 
of which will not soon be forgotten, must merely be alluded to. 

Nor can much more notice be bestowed on the Rehgious Poetry 
of the time. Except a few pieces which we have received from 
authors already named, it contains nothing of the very first order. 
The poems of Kirke White, all but posthumous, are more pleasing 
than original. There is much sweetness, but no great force, in the 
" Sabbath " of Grahame. By far the highest in this class is James 
Montgomery. He, besides some interesting poems of considerable 
bulk, narrative and descriptive, has written not a few pieces, de- 
votional and meditative, which are among the best religious poems 
in our language. PoUok's " Com-se of Time," much over-lauded 
on its appearance, is the immature work of a man of genius 
who possessed very imperfect cultivation. It is clumsy in plan, 
tediously dissertative, and tastelessly magniloquent : but it has 
passages of good and genuine poetry. Mention may also be claimed 
by the agreeable verses of Bishop Heber, and by the more recent 
effusions of Keble. 



THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 383 



CHAPTEE XV. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

SECTION THIRD : THE PROSE OF THE FIRST AGE. 

A. D. 1800— A. D. 1830. 

1. Novels and Eomances— The Waverlej Novels — Minor Novelists.— 2. 
Periodical "Writing — The Edinhm-gh Eeview — The Quarterly Review — 
Blackwood's Magazine.- — 3. Criticism — The Essays of Francis JeflErey. — 
4. Criticism and Miscellanies — Coleridge— Hazlitt — Lamb — Christopher 
North. — 5. Social Science — Jeremy Bentham — Political Economy — His- 
tory — Minor Historical Writers — Hallam's Historical Works. — 6. Theo- 
logy — Church History — Classical Learning — Scientific Theology — Prac- 
tical Theology — John Foster — Robert Hall — Thomas Chalmers. — 7. 
Speculative Philosophy — (1.) Metaphysics and Pyschology — Dugald 
Stewart and Thomas Bro^va — (2.) Ethical Science — Mackintosh — Jeremy 
Bentham — (3.) The Theory of the Beautiful — Alison — Jeffrey — Stewai-t — 
Knight — Brown — Symptoms of Further Change. 

1. After the metrical works which adorned so eminently the 
period we are now stud}Tng, the next place belongs to the Novels 
and Romances in Prose, both for the kindred natm-e of the sorts of 
composition, and for the world-wide fame achieved in this field by 
Sh- Walter Scott. 

It had undergone, before he trode it, much of that pm-u^ying and 
elevation, of which symptoms were traceable ta the last period we 
surveyed. In " Caleb WiUiams " and " Saint Leon," the strong 
but narrow mind of Godwin had sought to make the novel a vehicle 
for communicating peculiar social doctrines, with views of human 
life allied to the tragic. Miss Austen's scenes of every-day society 
had much merit for their cheerful reahty, and their freedom from 
false sensibility. Miss Porter's " Scottish Chiefs," pubhshed before 
the earliest of Scott's historical romances, had the merit of first 
entering the ground, but occupied it very feebly. Above aU, Miss 
Edgeworth, in her Irish Tales, showed how novel-readers may be 
at once interested and histructed, by acute and humorous comm.on- 



384 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

sense, not only unalloyed by tinsel sentimentality, but little warmed 
by lofty feeling of any kind. 

In 1814, Scott published his novel " Waverley ; " and the series, 
thenceforth carried on with surprising rapidity, attained from the 
beginning a popularity unexampled as well as fully deserved. The 
Waverley novels have been excepted, by many very cautious judges, 
from the sentence which banishes most works of prose fiction from 
the libraries of the young. The exemption seems to be justified by 
two considerations. These are not mere love-stories, but pictures of 
human life, expressing broad and manly and practical views, and 
animated by sentiments which are cheerful and correct, if not very 
elevated or solemn ; and, further, most of them exhibit history in a 
light which is extremely effective in exciting cm-iosity and interest, 
without degi'ading facts or characters to the sentimental level, or 
falsifying eitlier of them beyond the lawful and necessary stretch, of 
poetical embellishment. 

This is no fit occasion for dwelling with close scrutmy on those 
celebrated works, or for endeavouring to analyze satisfactorily the 
sources of their power. They may safely be pronounced to be the 
most extraordinary productions of thek class that ever were penned, 
and to stand, in literary value, as far above all other prose works of 
fiction, as the novels of Fielding stand above all others in our lan- 
guage except these. Nor need we pause over their usual looseness 
of plan, and their general carelessness and clumsiness of style, or 
animadvert on other faults which are perceptible to every reader. 
One point only may detain us for a moment : their fehcitous union of 
familiar humour in the portraiture of characters, with force and skill 
in the excitement of all varieties of serious passion short of the most 
intense. It might be hinted, also, that the former of these elements 
is decidedly the stronger, and that the combination of the two is 
most successful where that tone is allowed to predominate. This is 
especially the case with the few earliest of the series, " Waverley," 
" Guy Mannermg," and " The Antiquary," ^dgorous and easy por- 
traits of society and manners in Scotland during the eighteenth cen- 
tury. " Ivanhoe," on the other hand, coming nearest of aUto being 
a reproduction of one of the versified romances, and admirably, 
spirited in its pictures of chivalry and warfare, is feeble in those 
comic scenes where the writer's strength naturally lay. When 
he put on again his knightly armour, its weight unpeded the free- 
dom of his movements. 

Among the friends of Scott who followed him into the wilderness 
of fiction, was his son-in-law and biographer Lockhart, whose 
novels are very strong in their representations of tragic passion 



NOVELS AND REVIEWS. 385 

Sucli was also the variously-gifted Wilson, in whose " Lights and 
Shadows " the visionary loveliness of his poems shines out again, 
with even an increase of pathos, but still without free scope for those 
powers of sarcasm and humour, which, as we are not forbidden to 
believe, he has elsewhere proved. A very few other writers of the 
class must be hastily dismissed, and many altogether neglected. 
Extremes in the tone of thought and feeling are exhibited 'by the 
despondent imagination of Mrs Shelley, and the coarse and shrewd 
humour of Gait. The faculty of close observation possessed by the 
author of " Marriage," forms, in like manner, a contrast to the union 
of reflectiveness Tvith pathos which gave so much interest to Hope's 
" Anastasius." To that time, also, rather than to the more recent, 
belong the delightful scenes which Miss Mitford has constructed 
by elaborately embellishing the facts of rural English life. 

2. In beginning to look further around us on the prose litera- 
ture which adorned the early part of our century, we are arrested 
by a class of works which embraces, in one way or another, all its 
departments. 

No fact is more curious or important in the literary history of the 
age, than the prominence which was acquired in it by the leading- 
Reviews, and by those periodicals which, bearing the name of 
Magazines, and thus opening their pages to poetry and to prose fic- 
tion, yet were successful also in dissertations like those which w^ere 
the only contents- of the others. None but those who know accu- 
rately what Reviews and Magazines were, fifty years ago, can judge 
how vast is the rise in literary merit ; how wonderfully the compass 
of matter has been extended,; and how incomparably the little- 
heeded dicta of the older writers are exceeded in mfluence by the 
papers that appear in the modern periodicals, furnishing topics of 
talk or rules of thinking to the whole instructed community. 

The high literary position of the periodicals was speedily se- 
cured, their combination of pure literature with political and. social 
discussions settled, and their power founded beyond the possibility 
of overturn, by the earliest of the series. The Edinburgh Review. 
Commenced in 1802, it was placed, almost immediately, under the 
editorship of Francis Jeffrey, who conducted it till 1829. 

In that earlier part of its history which is here in question, there 
were not very many distinguished men of letters in the empire 
that did not furnish something to its contents. At first it re- 
ceived aid from Sir Walter Scott, as well as from other famous 
persons who, like him, held Tory prmciples. But, becoming more 
and more decidedly the organ of the opposite party, and sometimes 
using very little reserve in its denunciations of those whom its con- 

R 



386 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

ductors held to be in the wrong, it came at length to be supported 
chiefly, though never quite exclusively, by writers who, whUe most 
of them were linked by private friendships, concurred likewise in 
political opinion. Among these were several eminent statesmen 
of the Whig party : such as Lord Brougham, so energetic both in 
speech and writmg, and so various in his. range of thought and 
knowledge ; and Francis Horner, so universally honoured for the 
purity of his character, and for the masterly comprehensiveness 
of intellect which he brought to bear on public questions. J.olm 
Allen discussed constitutional problems, with that combination of 
historical knowledge and mental power for which he was so dis- 
tinguished : Malthus expounded the prmciples of political eco- 
nomy : Playfair made physical science both clear and mterestmg : 
the calm and dignified compositions of Mackintosh illustrated alike 
philosophy, and literature, and politics : and, m the papers contri- 
buted by Sydney Smith, one of the wittiest men of the day, the 
driest discussions became divertmg, the liveliest ideas were ex- 
tracted from the heaviest books, and mexhaustible showers of 
satirical raillery were discharged on the dullest opponents. Above 
all, the essays of the Editor, equally wonderful, in the chxum- 
stances, for their number, and the variety of their topics, for their 
grace and wit, their spirit and originahty, rendered, both to the 
Review and to the world of letters, services which we must imme- 
diately endeavour to estimate somewhat more exactly. 

The increasing differences of political creed, aggravated by some 
personal coohiesses, caused, in 1809, on the suggestion of Sir Wal- 
ter Scott, the establishment of the Quarterly Review in London, 
designed to be, both in literature and politics, a counterpoise to the 
Scottish organ of the Whigs. William Gifford, previously known as 
an accompKshed scholar and a vigorous sathical poet, edited it till 
1824 ; soon after which his place was taken by the present editor, 
John Gibson Lockhart. The new Review was distinguished, from 
the beginning, by talent and knowledge fully justifying the high repu- 
tation it attained : and it numbered among its contributors not a few 
of the most famous and able,men of the time. Both of its editors 
showed, in it as elsewhere, their full possession of the powers and 
accomplishments, qualifymg them both to dhect such a work, and 
to enrich it by writmgs of their own. Scott furnished to it some 
of the best of his dissertative^and critical compositions : and Southey, 
one of the very best prose writers of our century, was a steady and 
invaluable coadjutor, discussing in its pages a great variety of 
themes. The statesman Canning found time to give some aid from 
liis fund of brilliant wit and polished eloquence : and, owing some- 



REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES. 387 

thing to the wit and learning of Frere, the Quarterly EevieAv was 
indebted still more to qualities of the same sort possessed by the 
accomplished EUis. Solid and valuable knowledge was commu- 
nicated, em.bracing several departments, such as classics, in which 
its resources were peculiarly ample. INIuch, likewise, of that which 
it taught was imparted in a manner admu-ably calculated to make 
it both easHy intelHgible and generally attractive : a task which 
was nowhere perhaps executed better than in the geographical and 
other papers of Barrow. 

The Westminster Review, set on foot in 1825, as the organ of 
Jeremy Bentham and his disciples, hardly falls within onr period. 

Blackwood's Magazine was begim m 1817, in the same political in- 
terest as the Quarterly Re^dew. It is the only periodical of its class 
that here caUs for notice. Unequal and very often careless, and in 
its youth petulant and severe beyond the worst offences of the Edin- 
burgh Reviewers, it has contained articles of the highest literary 
merit, especially in criticism ; while its form has allowed a variety 
from which the heavier periodicals were shut out. As to its con- 
tributions, during the first twelve or fifteen years of its career, it 
must suffice for us to learn, that the names of Wilson and Lock- 
hart were connected with it by universal and uncontradicted be- 
lief. Two points regarding it should be remembered. It was 
the unflinching and idolatrous advocate of Wordsworth ; and some 
of its writers were om* first translators of German poetry, as weU as 
the most active mtroducers of German taste and laws in poetical 
criticism. 

3. Om' best efforts in Literary Criticism, named abeady as one of 
tlie brightest spots in our recent literature, have been, with few ex- 
ceptions, Essays in the Periodicals. 

&. i773.| Highest in the file stands the name of Francis Jeffrey, 
d. 1850. 1 -fvhose history is an instance, without a parallel, of ceaseless 
mental activity and of rapid versatility hi mental action. Practis- 
ing an arduous profession with the greatest success, he, the first bar- 
rister of his court, was also the most celebrated periodical essayist 
of his tune, a very remarkable thinker, and one of the best wTiter'^ 
in the English language. Though we look no further than his four 
volumes of Essays selected for republication, we shall hardly find 
any branch of general knowledge untouched ; and, treating none 
without throwing on it some ray of brilliant light, he has contrib- 
uted to several of them truths which are alike valuable and ori- 
ginal. His frequent depth of thought is disguised by the cheer- 
ful ripple which continually sparkles on the surface of the current : 
and his acuteness is marvellous, and incessantly awake. It hardly 



388 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

falls within our province to notice his many Political Disquisitions, 
further than by saying, that then- masterly reasoning, and their ani- 
mation and clearness of exposition, concur in giving to their patrio- 
tic and courageous author one of the liighest of all places among 
the literary advocates of the prmciples to which he so steadily 
adhered. 

His Criticisms on Poetry are probably the best of his Essays in 
matter, as they are certamly the most eloquently written. They 
are always flowing and spirited, glittermg with a gay wit and an 
ever- ready fancy : they very often blossom into exquisite felicities 
of diction ; and, in many passages, he speaks with the voice of one 
who was hunself almost a poet. Indeed his poetical susceptibility, 
and his love of the beautiful in art as well as nature, had an inten- 
sity very seldom co-existing with such keenness of the analytic 
faculties. His sensitiveness of feeling was nourished by an extra- 
ordinary aptitude for associating ideas ; and this power, again, had 
been strengthened by much meditation, the fruits of which, in his 
Essay on Beauty, entitle hun to a place in the history of our recent 
philosophy. His writings, especially the critical, are beautifully 
rich in the suggestion of moral ideas: and he is most fully 
entitled to advance the claim he did, " of having constantly endea- 
voured to combine ethical precepts with literary criticism, and 
earnestly sought to impress his readers with a sense both of the 
close connexion between sound intellectual attainments and the 
higher elements of duty and enjoyment, and of the just and ultimate 
subordination of the former to the latter." 

Lastly, however, those admirable criticisms are properly critical. 
While Macaulay uses poets and then- works as hints for constructing 
picturesque dissertations on man and society ; and while poetical 
reading prompts to "Wilson enthusiastic bursts of original poetry of 
his own : Jeffrey, fervid in his admiration of genius, but conscien- 
tiously stern in his respect for art, refuses to abstain from trying- 
poetry by its own laws ; to accept evanescent paroxysms of poetical 
power as equivalents for the fruit of reflective and earnest perform- 
ance ; or to grant an indemnity to any faults, which seem to him se- 
ductive enough to be dangerous as precedents for the future. The 
very familiarity with which he knew the old masters of English song, 
whose works indeed he was one of the first to reinstate in public 
favour, co-operated with his exalted view of the poet's functions, 
in making him a severe though instructive judge of the poetry of 
his day. When, also, his taste or his judgment was offended, he 
was certainly apt to lose, for a time, his sympathy with any excel- 
lencies that might accompany the faults. And, in the hasty passing 



CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE. 389 

of sentence on offenders, the ebullition of exuberant wit sometimes 
exceeded its usual bounds of playful good-nature. But his writings 
are invaluable to those who desire- to learn the true principles of 
poetical criticism ; and it is they, if any works of his age, that will 
be accepted hereafter as critical guide-books to the literature which 
sprang up around him, 

4. The Critical Writings of Coleridge, m his Lectures and else- 
where, are, like all that he has given us, tantalizing contrasts of great 
capacity with small fulfilment. His speculations of this sort, based 
on his German studies, add very much of his o^vn fine discernment 
and poetical intuition to their sedulous striving after primary laws. 
Obscure, vacillating, and sometimes capricious, he yet sowed the 
seeds of a kind of philosophical criticism, which will never perhaps 
be cultivated very successfully in our cold climate. 

The poet Campbell wrote criticism with fine taste and sentiment, 
in his " Specimens of the British Poets," as well as elsewhere. Isaac 
DTsraeli's books, though very weak in theh critical attempts, may 
be named for their pleasant gossiping, and their large assemblage of 
curious facts in literary history. One of the earliest and best of 
the works which ahned at creating a taste for the old literature of 
the language, vv-as Irving's " Lives of the Scottish Poets." 

A very high place among the critical essayists must be assigned 
1. 1778. ) ^0 William HazHtt, who, in his Lectures and other writings, 
d. 1830. i ^{^ manful service towards reviving the study of our ancient 
poetry, especially that of the Elizabethan age. Very acute, though in- 
consistent, in judgment, and exceedingly successful in many instances 
of analysis ; moody and uncertain in feeling, but warmly sensitive to 
some varieties of literary merit ; and displaying, both in his style 
and in his appreciation of poetry, more of blunt vigour than of well- 
balanced taste : this very original writer prompts speculation and 
study to all, and not least to those who hesitate at accepting his 
critical opinions. 

Of another temper is the kind of criticism, given us by Charles 
I 1775. •> Lamb in his " Specimens of the Dramatic Poets," and inter- 
d. 1835.1" spersed among his other effusions. Among these are the 
" Essays of Elia," miscellaneous sketches of life, fanciful and medi- 
tative, not easily reducible to a class, and probably not intended by 
their eccentric author to be placed in any. It is reaUy mipossible 
to describe Lamb's writings, in such a way as to make their charac- 
ter be understood by those who have not read them. His critical 
remarks issue from a wonderfully fine poetic feeling, and express 
opinions indicating at once force and narrowness of thought. His 
half-fictitious scenes are, in sentiment, in imagery, and in style, the 



390 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

most anomalous medleys by which readers were ever alternately 
perplexed, and amused, and moved, and delighted. 

The selected " Recreations of Christopher North " present but a 
very few of those critical dissertations and imagmative sketches, 
which, appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, have currently been 
attributed to the same pen. In this place it must suffice if the at- 
tention of literary students is called to the acknowledged volumes, 
as containing more of spontaneous poetry than ever before was 
couched in prose; more of original reflection than ever before 
was linked with so unrestrained a revelry of imagination ; and an 
alternation, not less unexampled in its extent and frequency, of the 
quaintest humour and the most practical shrewdness with tender 
and passionate emotion. 

5. The great mass of writings relating to Social and Political 
questions, already noticed as making a very important part in the 
literature of the day, cannot to us furnish matter for any special 
study. A scrutiny of them would involve an analysis of the con- 
tents of the leadmg Reviews : but a few writers may be mtroduced 
to us, besides those who have been named as contributors to the 
periodicals. 

No man of the time has influenced social science so much, often 
indeed against the will of those who were instructed, as Jeremy 
5. 1748. 1 Bentham, whose name will also have to occur again in an- 
t^. 1832.J other department. The masculine sagacity and indefati- 
gable search after truth, which distinguished this eccentric man, led 
him to doctrines which have enlisted under him an enthusiastic train 
of able followers : but the antagonism of his views, at many points, to 
the existing course of things, kindled from the beginning vehement 
dislike and opposition ; and his extravagant oddities of language 
have given a hold to much wicked wit. James Mill should be 
mentioned as the ablest of his immediate pupils. 

So far as the teaching of truth is concerned, we need not notice 
William Cobbett, who was, m the course of his long life, the advo- 
cate of all varieties of political principle. But he will long be re- 
membered as uncommonly dexterous in conducting controversy to 
the satisfaction of a mixed class of readers ; and he will be known 
still longer, as having written the most vigorous and idiomatic 
English that has appeared in our time. 

The teaching in Political Economy, commencing very early in the 
century, has had effects on public policy which, vast though they 
are, have as yet no more than begun. In our literary studies we 
can only note, among its earliest teachers, the acute Mill ; the com- 
prehensive and accurate M'Culloch ; Malthus, best known through 



HISTOKICAL WRITINGS. 391 

his theory of population ; and Ricardo, who is pronounced by com- 
petent authority to have been the most original thinker iji the 
science since Adam Smith. 

In the Historical department this period may either be said to 
have begun, or that before it to have closed, with the labours of Chal- 
mers and Pinkerton, chiefly useful as collectors of antiquarian mate- 
rials. They may fairly be regarded as having paved the way for a 
school of historical writing, in which, almost for the first time, our 
national records were consulted with strenuous industry, and accu- 
racy of research was held to be a higher merit than elegance or ani- 
mation in composition. The early history of England, especially for 
the Anglo- Saxon times, was illustrated by two writers of this class : 
Turner, most honourably laborious and trustworthy, but weari- 
somely heavy and pompous; Palgrave, equally industrious, and 
much more acute and ingenious. Lingard followed, as the skilful 
advocate of the Eoman- Catholic views ; and Brodie and Godwin, as 
controvertors of the doctrines which Hume had taught in his history 
of the Stuarts. In Hallam's " Constitutional History of England," 
the good qualities of the antiquarian student are united with a 
masterly and impartial analysis of the growth of our political insti- 
tutions, and set off by a classical grace of diction, and much power 
of exciting interest. The work is the only one of its kmd and 
time, that combines, in a high degree, literary skiU with valuable 
matter ; and its merit is the greatest that can belong to an historical 
work, avowedly and designedly dissertative rather than narrative. 
The distinguished writer, (whose varied learning we shall yet meet 
on different ground,) conferred another standard work on our 
language, in his " View of the State of Europe during the Middle 
Ages." After it may be named the tasteful Italian Histories of 
Roscoe ; nor should we forget the industry, and knowledge, and 
mastery of easy and correct language, which was shown, in this 
walk as in so many others, by the poet Southey. 

6. Southey, as the fond Historian of the Church of England, and 
the interesting biographer of Wesley, will usher us, from our last 
department, into the Theology of his time. Overagainst him may 
be placed M'Crie, the formidable advocate of old Scottish views, in 
his lives of Knox and Melville, works distinguished by great eccle- 
siastical learning, mgenuity of argument, and force of style. 

In passing from the history of the Church, we must turn aside 
for a moment to the Classical Learning of England, chiefly to be 
found among her churchmen. It has been neglected by us, since 
we left it in the hands of Bentley ; but now, in Porson, it found a 
chief whose Greek learning was superior even to his, and whose 



392 THE FIRST AGE OF THE NKNfETEENTH CENTURY. 

critical acnteness, if not greater, was at least more wiFely directed. 
The name of Elmsley is the only one which our time allows us to 
select, from the large list of Porson's able followers and rivals. 

A new kind of erudition, that of the biblical critics of Germany, 
was imported by Bishop Marsh : and from his studies in the philo- 
sophy of that country Coleridge derived much of the prompting, 
that led him to the perplexing mixture of devout reverence, alter- 
nate largeness and narrowness of opinion, and obscure struggling to 
gaia ultimate truths, which make up the character of his religious 
reveries and aspirations. 

If we turn from Scientific to Practical Theology, we find ourselves 
embarrassed, beyond hope of extrication, amidst a vast mass of ser- 
mons, devotional treatises, and the like, many of which have fair 
literary merit, while none decisively excel the rest. The labyrinth 
must not be entered. But, in the glance we throw from without 
over its multiform windings, we see enough to be satisfied that reli- 
gious thought and sentiment have occupied, among the various 
pursuits of the time, an increasingly high place ; and that, with the 
difiusion of secular knowledge among the people, energetic attempts 
have been coupled to sow not less v/idely the seeds of spmtual life. 
Three of the agents in the good work tower above their feUows, 
alike honourable for religious zeal, and for powerful thought elo- 
quently delivered. The youngest readers among us are already 
familiar with the names of Robert Hall, and John Foster, and 
Thomas Chalmers. 

h. 1770. 1 Foster, who failed as a preacher, had a much wider grasp 
d. 1843. J of mind than either of the other two, both of whom gained 
brilliant success as pulpit orators. He never fails to seize his 
topic as a whole ; and the details in his treatment of it, though 
always sagacious, and often strikingly acute, are never allowed to 
tempt us or him into a forgetfulness of the truth he is mainly bent 
on expounding. Perhaps the secret of his originahty lies in his 
uniting so much reflective power with so much of close observation. 
His style is not peculiar : it is both easy and strong, moderately 
h. 1764.1 embellished, and not infrequently very graceful. Hall is, 
d. 1831. j even in print, much more of the orator ; although his lan- 
guage, with all its richness, betrays, in his published writings, 
symptoms of anxious elaboration. Probably there could not be 
cited from him anything equal in force or originality to some 
passages of Foster's ; but it would still more certainly be impos- 
sible to detect him indulging in feeble common-places. 
b. 1780. ) I^ point of oratorical power, Chalmers was one of the 
d. 1847. J great men of our century; perhaps, indeed, the very great- 



THOMAS CHALMERS AND DUGALD STEWART. 393 

est of those whose genius we have an opportunity of estimating 
by the publication of its fruits ; and, unlike Hall, he fully justifies, 
by his writings, the impression felt by aU who heard him preach. 
Looking at his theme steadily from one point of view, which often 
does not command a very wide prospect, he represents this aspect 
of his question with wonderful force, at once analyzing with mar- 
vellous subtlety, illustrating with magnificent force of imagination, 
and clothing everything in a diction, which, though cumbrous and 
unrefined, wears a commanding air of strength and fervour. Our 
century has already produced several thinkers who have possessed 
more remarkable comprehensiveness, many who have been clearer 
expositors, and very many who have had greater logical closeness 
without being deficient in mastery of principles. But it has produced 
very few that are comparable to Chalm.ers in the original keenness 
of intuition with which he perceived truths previously undetected ; 
and it has had, probably, no man whatever, who has combined so 
much power of thought with so much poAver of impressive com- 
munication. 

7. Although, in Abstract or Speculative Philosophy, our period 
was less strong than in those fields of thinking which lie closest to 
practice, yet here also it was the parent of much that was both 
ingenious and eloquent. 

In the inquiries usually classed together by the name of Mental 
Philosophy, tlie only writers who gained extensive fame were two, 
who were, in succession. Professors of Moral Philosophy in Edin- 
burgh. Their writings, hke their teaching, ranged widely, and with 
advantage, beyond the province described in the title of their chair. 
h. 1753. ) Dugald Stewart is one of the most attractive of all philo- 
d. 1828. J sophical writers. He is equally perspicuous and eloquent, 
fertile in happy illustrations drawn from life, and nature, and books : 
he rises to an animated fervour in his contemplation of grandeur or 
beauty ; but he rises highest of all when warmed by his ever-felt 
admiration of moral excellence. His style, classically regular, is not 
far from being a perfect model for all philosophical writings, which 
are intended to impress a wide circle of cultivated readers. As a 
thinker, he attained no decisive originality : yet he was more than 
what he called himself, a disciple of Eeid. In Ethics especially, he 
was much above this : but his Psychological and IMetaphysical sys- 
tem was, in all essentials, that of his master. He has given us not 
a few very acute analyses ; and he would have given more but for a 
decided want of logical sequence, and a timidity which often 
checked his advance when he stood at the very verge of a new and 
valuable truth. 

e2 



394 THE FIRST 'AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY. 

h. 1778. His successor, Thomas Brown, exhibited a subtlety of 
d. 1820. thought hardly ever exceeded in the history of philosophy. 
Some of his psychological dissertations are masterpieces of mental 
analysis. Nor is he ever arrested either by respect for the opinions 
of his predecessors, or by pausing to ask himself whether a truth he 
seems to have discovered may not clash with some other doctrine 
already announced by him with equal confidence. His power of 
speculative vision, with all its wonderful keenness, is very far from 
being truly comprehensive : he has been proved, also, to have mis- 
apprehended, in his hastily-conducted inquiries, the real state of the 
most important metaphysical questions on which he pronounced 
judgment : and the doctrine which he adopted from older writers 
as the keystone of his symmetrical system of psychology, (namely, 
that all mental phenomena are but varied instances of association 
or suggestion,) is one in regard to which it may not be rash to say, 
that, instead of solving difficulties, it merely evades them. His 
style, though neither vigorous nor very pure in taste, is ornate and 
lively ; and his Lectures generally carry on the reader easily and 
with interest. Probably no writings on Mental Philosophy were 
ever so popular. 

Less celebrated than the writings of these eminent men, but in 
many points of view not less worthy of a place in the annals of their 
era, are those Dissertations on the History of Philosophy which 
were contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica by Playfair, Les- 
lie, and Mackintosh. The works of the fu'st tw^o, dealing Avitli 
Mathematical and Physical Science, can here receive no special 
h. 1765. ) attention. Sir James Mackintosh's treatise on the History 
cz.1832. j Qf Ethics, which deals likewise with that of Metaphysics, 
is rightly described by Whewell, its last editor, as alike valuable for 
its learning, its critical sagacity, its classical style, and the modera- 
tion and good-sense of the author's own opinions. 

Nor were these the only important accessions that were made to 
the science of morals. Among the encyclopaedic labours of Bentham 
was a System of Ethics. His doctrine was a variety of the Utili- 
tarian scheme, declaring vulue to be simply that which tends 
to produce the greatest possible happiness. 

Other branches of the theory of mind were likewise studied by 
this indefatigable thinker. Among his posthumous works are trea-' 
tises on Logic, Ontology, Grammar, and Language ; and he had 
early attempted one of the most important of all philosophical tasks, 
a Classification of the Arts and Sciences, the undertaking which we 
saw to have been one of the two great problems aimed at by 
Bacon. Bentham's writings on all such questions have the im- 



SPECULATIONS ON SUBLIMITY AND BEAUTY. 395 

perfections incident to one who wrote for his own satisfaction, 
without asking what was already known ; and who consequently- 
cared equally little, though he proved at. great length positions cur- 
rently received by other philosophers, or assumed without proof 
doctrines that had long ago been refuted. But there is none of his 
fragments that does not suggest to us some valuable truth, which 
probably we should not have thought of for ourselves, and could not 
find set down elsewhere. 

Among the speculations in mental philosophy must be placed, 
lastly, a group of interesting treatises on the Theory of the Sublime 
and Beautiful, a matter deeply important to poetry and the other 
fine arts. All the writers concur in tracing the feelings in question 
to processes of Mental Association; a doctrine which certainly is not 
sound in regard to all the phenomena, but which explains many of the 
most common and curious of them, and prompts a vast variety of 
striking and instructive illustrations. The inquiry was first under- 
taken in Alison's pleasing Essays on Taste ; it was prosecuted, with 
much greater force of reasoning, in Jeffrey's Essay on Beauty, and 
in one portion of Stewart's Philosophical Essays ; and contribu- 
tions of worth were made also by the learned and paradoxical 
Payne Knight, and in the Lectures of Thomas Brown. 

It should be noted, in the last place, that, towards the close of 
this period, some facts occurred, the consequences of which are 
to be sought rather in the time that has followed. The novel 
science of Phrenology was introduced. Developments of philoso- 
phy, which promise to have more permanent effects, were heralded 
by the commencing study of the Metaphysics of Germany, and by 
the attention which anew began to be paid to the doctrines of the 
Aristotelian I^ogic. 



396 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY. 

SECTION FOURTH : THE LITERATURE OF THE SECOND AGE. 

A.D. 1830— A.D. 1852. 

William IV. :— 1830-1837. 
Victoria :— 1837-1852. 

1. Poetry — Minor Poets.— 2. The Genius and "Works of Tennyson. — 3. Novels 
— Bulwer — Minor Novelists — Thackeray — Dickens, — 4. Essays and His- 
tories — Hallam's Literature of Europe — De Quincey's Criticisms — Mae- 
aulay's Essays and History — Alison's History — Carlyle's Works. — 
5. Eeligious Works — Newspapers — Reviews and ]\Iagazines — Instruction 
for the People — Encyclopaedias. — 6. Philology, Anglo-Saxon, English, 
and Classical — History, Classical and Modern — Travels. — 7. Physical 
Science — Political Economy — Logic — Whewell — John Mill — Metaphysics 
and Psychology — Sir William Hamilton,— Contemforaey American 
Literature. — 8. History and Character of Literary Progress in Ame- 
rica. — 9. Retrospect— The First Age of the Century — Novelists— Irving 
and Cooper — Poets — Bryant and Dana. — 10. Poets of the Present Day- 
Mrs Brooke— Longfellow— Novels and Romances. — 11. Theology — Chan- 
ning — Mental Philosophy— Orations and Periodicals — History — Bancroft 
and Prescott. 

1. Our studies cannot be closed without a glance at the Litera- 
ture of the generation in which we live. But the glance must be 
hasty ; and the opinions founded on it must be both cautious and 
briefly expressed. The only names which can find a place in our 
memoranda will be those of literary persons who have acquired exten- 
sive fame, or whose efforts have already achieved results from which 
permanent effects cannot but follow ; and our estimate of the intel- 
lectual character of the time ought to be formed with the hesitation 
becoming those wlio, just because they are themselves imbued with 
its spirit, are not impartial judges of the value or the ultimate ten- 
dency of its exertions. 

The want of originality with which we, the sons of the age, are 
almost unanimous in taxing it, must be admitted to be very obvious 



TPIE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 397 

in its Poetry. The huge wave which, earlier in the century, threw 
on shore so many treasures, has long since ebbed; and there is 
little for us to gather but the shells left by the ripple of an ordi- 
nary tide. Poems were never produced by so large a number of 
writers as within the last thirty years ; and never were so many 
pieces written, that show felicitous moments both in matter and in 
language. But seldom also have so few poems appeared, which rise 
sufficiently above mediocrity to have a chance of survivance. In 
Lyrical and Sentimental verse, our stock has been particularly large. 

We are probably doing some injustice by omission, as in the case 
of Bailey, Home, or Knowles, when, from among the poets whose 
fate ^vith posterity is still doubtful, we select a very few as most 
worthy of remembrance. Henry Taylor deserves notice for the 
tine meditativeness and well-balanced judgment shown in his dramas, 
as well as in his prose essays ; Browning, for the strength of thought 
which struggles through the obscurity of all his poems-; and Mrs 
Browning, for sunilar merits accompanied with greater force of ima- 
gination. Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, also, is doubtless a good 
deal infected by the mclination to mysticism, or to a kind of serai- 
philosophy in verse, which is prevalent among our worshippers of 
the muse ; and his metrical compositions have an artificial stateliness, 
indicating him to be more at his ease in prose. But he deserves 
honourable commemoration for the high sense he everywhere shows 
of the functions of poetic art, for the skill with which his Dramas 
are constructed, and for the overflowing picturesqueness which 
fills his " King Arthur." Notice is demanded, likewise, by the 
vigorous conceptions of Elliott, the " Corn-Law Rhymer ; " and by 
the remarkable union of grotesque humour with depth of serious 
feeling, that marked the genius of Thomas Hood. 

2. Alfred Temiyson, the only very brilliant poet of om* genera- 
tion, is entitled ^to be compared mth the poets of the last. His 
works constitute a new link in that series of poetical changes, 
which had its first step in Wordsworth and its second m Shelley. 
Theoretically considered, the movement may be said to consist in 
an increasing predominance of the lyrical and didactic elements of 
poetry over the epic and dramatic : the narration of events, and 
the portraiture of character and action, have become more and 
more subordinate to the representation of the poet's moods of feel- 
ing, or to the imaginative embodiment of reflective thought. Views 
which have been expressed freely in preceding stages of this survey 
intimate sufficiently an opinion, (not likely to be generally ac- 
quiesced in at present,) that progress like this is not in" a direction 
promising to lead to poetic greatness. Nor is there reason for 



398 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

believing that even Tennyson's poems, by far the most powerful 
of those in which tendencies of the sort have lately been manifested, 
have really exerted a wide or commanding influence. 

But, in their kmd, they are very beautiful. His mind is exquisitely 
poetical : his diction is often felicitous in the extreme : his suscepti- 
bility of those refined emotions, which his favourite objects of con- 
templation are calculated to excite, is alike delicate and profound : 
and much of his imagery is not only fascinating for its natural and 
suggestive aptness, but marked by a very strong originality. It is not 
wonderful, either that he should have captivated so many minds alive 
to fine influences, or that his turn, both of thought and of style, 
should have found so many imitators. His very faults, though 
they may offend exact judgment or cool ardent sympathies, never 
involve coarseness either of taste or of feeling. 

Many of his poems are sure to live : though, in the days of our 
grandchildren as now, some of his readers will admu-e, as a fault- 
less gem, one of his lyrics, or baEads, or pieces of fantasy, which 
seems to others, equally admiring his genius, to be spoiled by 
strained conceits, or mannerism of phrase, or over-crowding of 
images. The exquisite finishing which he gives to his poems, both 
in language and in structure, does indeed sometimes injure their 
effect, yet is worthy of all honour in our century ; and, in setting 
such an example, and drawing followers after him by the force and 
fineness of his genius, he allows us the satisfaction of claiming, for 
our contemporary poetry, one point of superiority over the most 
famous works of the tune immediately before ours. He is, especially 
in his poems of the last few years, led astray much oftener by an 
over-subtlety of thought, which gives birth to analogies that are 
very often really cold, sometimes quite unpoetical, and occasionally as 
far-fetched as the most unnatural conceits of the seventeenth century. 
Yet, puzzled or chilled as we may sometimes be, there breaks 
through, ever and anon, even where the blots are most thickly 
strev/ed, a gleam of romantic fancy as bright, or a touch of tender 
emotion as irresistible, as any thmg in the whole range of lyric 
poetry. 

Tennyson's most elaborate effort, "The Princess, A Medley," 
prognosticates, too truly, by its quaint name, a want of success 
in the harmonizmg of incongruous elements. But it has innumer- 
able beauties of detail. His smaller pieces are still those on 
which his poetical eminence rests most surely: and not a few 
of these, contained in his two earlier volumes, justify the warmest 
admiration of poetically endowed readers. Perhaps, however, 
nothing that he has written is more interesting than the series of 



NOVELS AND ROMANCES. 399 

elegiac musings, in which, under the significant title " In Memo- 
riara," he mourns, with the tenderest voice of friendship worthily- 
bestowed, over the premature extinction of rare genius and accom- 
plishments. 

3. Among the hundreds of Novels and Komances which have been 
poured forth in our day, many of them by writers of much talent 
and skill, it would be rash to seek for any parallel to the multifari- 
ous power of Scott. Prospero's wand lies buried with him among 
tlie ruins of Dryburgh Abbey. Among the earlier novels of the 
time, those of Bulwer bear, much more decidedly than any others, 
the stamp of native genius ; and, although several of them represent 
views of life which are neither pleasing, nor just, nor wisely calcu- 
lated to be morally instructive, they not only have great force of 
serious passion, but exhibit unusual skill of design. In some of 
his latfer works, this distinguished writer rises mto a much higher 
sphere of ethical contemplation than"that in which he had previously 
moved. " Pelham" and some others of his earlier novels will always, 
probably, be his most popular productions : but there is a nobler 
ambition, and an ambition worthily sustained, in his historical ro- 
mances, Rienzi, Harold, and The Last of the Barons. 

From among the other Novelists, a very few only can be selected 
for hasty notice. The novels of Theodore Hook, sparkling with 
turns of verbal wit, have really no substance that can ensure them 
long survivance. Nor is there much promise of prolonged life in 
the showy and fluent historical tales of James, the clumsy though 
humorous sea-stories of Marryat, or the monotonously gay scenes 
of Lever, The many novels of Mrs Marsh, and Mrs Hall's narratives 
and sketches, are pleasing and tasteful : Mrs Trollope's portraits of 
character are rough and clever caricatures. Great force of descrip- 
tion, with a good deal of overheated feeling, has been shown by 
writers describing the lower departments of Irish life ; Banim being 
by far the most original and impressive of these, while Griffin was 
much weaker, and Carleton, in a different key, is better than either. 
The satirical novels, for which the versatile genius of the 
younger DTsraeli has found leisure amidst the turmoil of political 
warfare, introduce us to a higher class of fictions. In all of these 
there is exerted much more pov/er of thinking, than in those of the 
miscellaneous group last alluded to. The meritorious attempts 
made, in Miss Martineau's earlier stories, to teach the truths of 
political economy by invented examples, were full of the writer's 
characteristic clearness and sagacity : but they were neither lively 
enough in narrative, nor dramatic enough in their representations 
of human character and manners, to excite the interest that was 



400 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

aimed at. The nan-ative sketches of the dramatist Douglas Jerrold 
exhibit, amidst their fantastic and cynical humour, so much real 
seriousness of thought and purpose, as to deserve being singled from 
the crowd, and placed among the reflective and speculative fictions 
of the day. One or two very attractive works of the class inculcate 
or insinuate social theories so startling, that it is here prudent to 
leave them unnoticed. 

But, among those contemporary writers who, at an earlier or 
later stage of their career, have aimed at making the novel illus- 
trate, as far as its form would allow, the questions which agitate 
society most powerfully, there are two whose works are, perhaps, the 
most marked features in the literature of our time. They may, 
indeed, though very unlike each other, be said to be the founders 
of a new school in novel-writing. These are, William Makepeace 
Thackeray and Charles Dickens. 

Thackeray has given to his pictures of society and character all 
that they could receive from extraordinary skill of mental analysis, 
great acuteness of observation, and formidable strength and fineness 
of sarcastic irony : but he has not been able, if indeed he ever de- 
sired, to excite continuous or lively sympathy, either by interest- 
ing incidents, or by the exhibition of deep passion, vehement or pa- 
thetic. Dickens has done much more than all which Thackeray has 
left unattempted. While his painting of character is inimitably vigor 
ous and natural, his stories are always interesting, and would be 
much more so if they were less encumbered by minute details : and 
his power of exciting emotion ranges, with equal success, from hor- 
ror (sometimes too intense) to melting pathos, and thence to a 
breadth of humour which degenerates into caricature. He cannot 
soar into the higher worlds of imagination ; and his tread is too 
heavy even for the secluded field of romantic or poetic meditation. 
But he becomes strong, and inventive, and affecting, the moment 
his foot touches the firm ground of reality : and nowhere is he more 
at ease, nowhere more sharply observant or more warmly sympathe- 
tic, than in scenes whose meanness might have disgusted, or whose 
moral foulness might have appalled. 

4. In the Art of Criticism, our generation has witnessed the ap- • 
pearance of the only great work of the kind, that has been given to 
the language during the century. The fame previously won by Henry 
Hallam in rougher fields, has been widened by his " Introduction to 
the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seven- 
teenth Centuries," which has instantly taken its place in the fore- 
most rank of our classical standards. There are not many books 
resting on so diversified a fund of learning ; there are not many that 



HALL AM, DE QUINCEY, AND MACAULAY. 401 

are written at once so clearly, so chastely, acd so attractively; 
there are fewer which show, as the endowments of one mind, snch 
soundness of judgment, mastery of philosophical principles, and re- 
finement and susceptibility in literary taste ; and still fewer are 
there whose spirit and temper are so uniformly dignified, and fair, 
and kindly. If there be any book possesssing all these virtues in 
as eminent a degree, students of literature will receive an inestimable 
benefit from the person who shall point it out. 

Among the innumerable fragments of criticism, many of them 
written with much ability, that have recently been contributed to peri- 
odicals, by far the most valuable are those of Thomas De Quincey. 
That this variously-gifted man should have spent his strength on fit- 
ful and petty efforts, cannot but be sincerely regretted, by all who 
are familiar with his quaint yet refined eloquence, his stores of eru- 
dition, and his unusual combination of metaphysical acuteness with 
poetical taste and sensibility. 

The Essays of Thomas Babington Macaulay in the Edinburgh 
Review are the most impressive of all the periodical papers of our 
century. The worth of their matter is always the greater, the 
nearer their topics lead him to that elevated ground, which he has 
begun to tread, with a step so commanding, in his admirable His- 
tory of England. One feels a temptation to liken this powerful 
writer to Gibbon, for the exotic aspect of his diction, and still more 
for the skill with which he insinuates reflection while seeming only 
to relate events or portray character. But the epigrammatic 
terseness of his style is by as much above the cumbrousness of the 
elder historian, as his leading doctrines, (however opinions may 
differ on particulars,) are sounder, more philosophical, and more 
conducive to the good of mankind. Though, likewise, we are 
reminded of another celebrated writer and orator, by the concrete 
and imaginative character of the medium through which Macaulay 
sees all general truths, yet his exposition of these is executed with 
much greater skill of deliberate art than that which Edmund Burke 
possessed, and is equally free not only from his unwise profusion of 
ideas and words, but from his frequent offences against purity of 
taste. Our illustrious historian unites, to a degree very seldom 
equalled, extensive and various information with his extraordinary 
power of impressive representation ; and there is not, perhaps, in 
the range of our literature, any parallel to the readiness, and apt- 
nesS; and fulness, with which his stores of knowledge are poured 
forth in illustration of the objects he contemplates. Macaulay's 
great work has already shown that history may be written as it 
never was written before ; at once telling the national story with 



402 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

accuracy and force, making it as lively as a novel throngli touches 
of individual interest, and teaching precious truths with fascinat- 
ing eloquence, whether by incidental hints or in elaborate disserta- 
tions. 

With the celebrated writer last spoken of, no comparison can be 
challenged by any historian of our time, unless it may be Sir Archi- 
bald Ahson, In some pouits of excellence, though certainly not 
in many, this parallel is sustained with much credit. Doubtless 
the historical champion of constitutional Whiggism very much ex- 
cels his rival of the Tory or Conservative side, not only in splen- 
dour and variety of illustrative imagery, but also in refinement of 
taste and mastery of literary art : and most readers will believe him 
to have the advantage, quite as far, both in comprehensiveness and 
in originality of thinking. But the two aim, with like constancy of 
endeavour, at submitting facts to the test of principles ; and, while 
Macaulay never permits his disquisitions to impair the symmetrical 
structure of his composition, Ahson, fond of statistical detaUs and 
of speculations in political economy, is thus able in many places to 
prompt curious and instructive reflection, at the cost of considerable 
interruption to the flow of his narrative. Both, again, are practised 
periodical writers, and owe much, both in merit and in defect, to 
the habits which such writing is apt to produce. Not a few of 
Alison's pictures, both of characters and events, are painted wHlth 
very great vigour : and a warmth of feeling, prompting exceedingly 
lively descriptions, is always awakened in his mmd by the contem- 
plation of circumstances bearing on the political opinions which 
he has so much at heart. He acknowledges the literary merits of 
Macaulay with a manly and generous cordiality : he displays a seF- 
devotion worthy of the days of knighthood, when he throws himself 
into the breach to defend positions, which are usually abandoned by 
his party as no longer tenable ; and there is a courage still more 
chivalrous in the calm appeals he makes to posterity, in behalf of 
certain views of legislation and public economy which are peculiar to 
himself. Altogether, to say nothing of Alison's minor writings, his 
earlier History of Europe is miquestionably one of the most distin- 
guished works of our generation ; and its continuation, now hi 
progress, promises already to maintain, if not to extend, the repu- 
tation that has been won by its author. 

From among the reviewers of the day, Thomas Carlyle stept out, 
long ago, into his own secluded walk, there to meditate in an inde- 
pendence which for a time was solitary, but with an irregular origi- 
nality of reflection, and an equally irregular power of representation, 
which soon made his words be widely listened to, and must secure 



CARLYLE AND MINOR PROSE WRITERS. 403 

them against being speedily forgotten. If youthful students should 
find it impossible to comprehend exactly the character of this re- 
markable mind, or to estimate justly the fruits it has borne, they wiU 
fail only in attempts which have been made, not less in vain, by 
vehement admirers and by alarmed opponents. The language and 
the thoughts alike set at nought all hereditary rules ; the one, as 
much as the other, compounded of elements English and German, 
with elements, predominant over all, which no name would fit except 
that of the author. In respect of opinions, Carlyle himself perhaps, 
and certainly his , most ardent disciples, would scorn that he should 
be suspected of orthodoxy, or acquiescence in doctrines generally 
admitted, on any question whatever. In sentiment, again, a gen- 
erous expansiveness alternates painfully with despondent gloom and 
passionate restlessness and inconsistency. But it is impossible to 
hear, without a deep sense of original power, the oracular voices 
that issue from the cell ; enigmatical like the ancient responses, and, 
like them, illuminating doubtful vaticination with flashes of wild and 
half-poetic fantasy. 

5. The names in regard to which we have now learned something, 
have, all of them, become more or less familiar to the public ear. 
Most of those others with which also we must contract some ac- 
quaintance are, indeed, less widely celebrated, but belong to men 
whose talents and services are not less worthy of remembrance. 
In our hasty review of the most prominent phenomena, not a few 
recent works must remam unnoticed from which all of us are daily 
reaping knowledge : and we must neglect several able thinkers and 
writers, whose reputation will doubtless have to be recognised as 
permanently high, if this slight record should ever, by other hands, 
be continued to another stage. 

In this last position are, perhaps, some of the numerous contri- 
butors to the Religious and Ecclesiastical Literature of our day. 
Contemporary writings of this class, mdeed, many of them the 
organs of conflicting opinions on those questions which are 
agitated so strenuously among us, cannot with any propriety 
be examined in inquiries such as ours. We ought not, however, 
to leave unnoticed the vigour, both of thought and style, which 
has commanded so much attention for the writings of Isaac 
Taylor. We stand, also, on a kind of neutral ground between the 
religious and the secular, when we peruse a good many reflective 
Essays of the day ; among which the best known are those of the 
brothers Hare, and the more recent volumes of Helps. 

Within the last twenty years, the Periodicals have undergone 
mighty revolutions ; and among these it is right to notice the 



404 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

remarkable advancement which Newspapers have made, alike in 
ability of thought and writmg, and in the extent of their influence 
on the minds of the public. The extraordinary amount of active 
speculation and spirited composition, which then- anonymous authors 
have lavished on them during the last thirty years, would fully 
justify expressions of surprise, like those whicli escaped from us 
when we observed, in the early part of the century, similar phenom- 
ena in the larger periodicals. The name of Albany Fonblanque, 
by far the most distinguished of those energetic writers, has been 
brought within our range by the separate publication of a series 
of his papers. 

The older Reviews and Magazines still, on the whole, keep the 
lead; but they are much less vigorous, perhaps, in matter, and cer- 
tainly in manner ; and they have to do battle with several younger 
and very formidable rivals. More than one of these have avowedly 
been founded with the design of giving expression to opinions, not 
adequately represented elsewhere, in regard to religious and ecclesi- 
astical questions. Periodicals, however, like all other Hterary works, 
have been curiously affected by those attempts to make books very 
cheap, which are always becoming more and more frequent. Then- 
origin might perhaps be traced to the Christian desire of pious 
persons to make spiritual instruction accessible to the poor. One 
or two other early undertakings of the sort have no literary claim 
to remembrance. The design was carried out with ability, for the 
first time, in the field of general information, by the Publications 
of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge ; and these 
have since been variously emulated by the enterprise of book- 
sellers and otherwise. Charles Knight's "Penny Magazine," the 
" Saturday Magazine" of the Society for Promoting Christian 
Knowledge, and " Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," were not long 
allowed to stand alone. The publishers named in the last sen- 
tence, (well known likewise as authors,) led the way also in pro- 
ducing other cheap books, designed to convey solid and practical 
information to the people ; and lately we have been inmidated with 
light reading offered in similar shapes. 

There has been a vast deal of useful and able compilation, laying 
claim, in some instances, to the merit of independent research, and 
calculated for a more instructed class of readers than the works last 
noticed. Among these we have had more than one large series o^ 
works, either quite miscellaneous, as Constable's Miscellany had 
been, which was the parent of the race ; or comprehending a wide 
range of topics, historical and scientific, lilce Lardner's Cyclopaedia ; 
or confined to history and geography, like Oliver and Boyd's Cabinet 



PHILOLOGY AND HISTORY. 405 

Library. In school-books there has been great improvement. The 
collection of knowledge for the use of ordinary readers has been 
very skilfully systematized in the Encyclopaedias. One of these, 
the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, usually known by the name of its 
celebrated editor Sir David Brewster, was completed at the close 
of the first of the stages into which the nineteenth century is here 
divided. Then also had been begun two others : the Encyclo- 
paedia Metropolitana ; and the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its last 
edition. The Penny Cyclopaedia belongs entirely to our own 
generation. 

6. In the midst of our methodizing and popularizing, the well- 
known writers whom we first encountered have by no means been 
the only original thinkers, nor perhaps in a just sense the most 
original, that have appeared in our day. Both in erudition, and in 
the pursuit of the more abstract branches of philosophy, we shaU 
bequeath to our successors not a little knowledge that will be 
worth preserving. 

Philology is actively prosecuted in two directions, in both of 
which we have owed much to the impulse of German scholars, but 
have not been unable to add something of our ovm. 

In the first place, Anglo-Saxon Learning, which can hardly be 
said to have ever existed till lately, has been cultivated with a suc- 
cess by which, in the early stage of these studies, we have sought 
to profit; and which, already fruitful in instructive results, pro- 
mises to yield, by and by, a harvest yet more valuable. The liter- 
ature and antiquities, both of that period and of the earliest times 
after the Conquest, have likewise had much new light thrown on 
them. Names worthy of commemoration are omitted, when we 
recall attention to those philologers whom we took for our guides 
in studying the early history of the English Language. 

Secondly, we should remember, that there have lately been in- 
troduced to us novel and interestmg views, both as to the Languages 
and the History of Greece and Eome. In philology, besides the 
editing of a good many classics and other works for the purposes 
of teaching, theories promismg to be important for elucidating the 
liistory of language have been propounded by several scholars, such 
as Long, Key, and Donaldson. Niebuhr's masterly researches have 
communicated their spirit to the Eoman History of Arnold, so 
estimable otherwise as a good and enlightened man : the History of 
Greece has assumed new aspects in the hands of Thhlwail and 
Grote : and that of Grecian Literature has in part been excellently 
related by Mure. 

Modern History has likewise been cultivated with very great 



406 THE SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

assiduity, and has added very mucli to our store of useful know- 
ledge ; \Yhile several of the works have been good pieces of writing 
as well as storehouses of valuable research. Napier's History of 
the Peninsular War has so much literary merit, that it ought pro- 
bably to have received a more prominent place than it holds in 
being named here. Several biographical books likewise must have 
been described in any review aiming atfuhiess : and, in.noticing Lord 
Mahon's historical volumes, we perhaps omit others that deserve to 
be ranked higher. One of the most meritorious among all the late 
works of this class is Tytler's History of Scotland. It is honour- 
ably distinguished for the industry and variety of its independent 
researches. 

It is right to observe, in the way of appendix to the historical 
works, the very large number of Books of Travels which have ap- 
peared in this age, as indeed in all other stages of om- modern litera- 
ture. Much popularity has been gamed by the writers of some of 
these ; such as Inglis, Laing, Head, Warburton, and the author of 
Eothen. 

7. If erudition is the most obvious feature among om- philological 
and antiquarian and historical writers, activity and originahty of 
speculation have been shown, if anywhere, in the pursuit of the 
Sciences ; and not in those of body only, but in those also which deal 
Avith the mind of man. Without presummg to enter a province 
lying beyond our competency, we cannot but pause to reflect, with 
surprise as weU as admiration, on the marvellous advances which 
our generation has mtnessed in mechanics, chemistry, optics, geo- 
logy, natural history, and other Physical Sciences ; nor can we re- 
member, without a warrantable pride, how large a share in the bril- 
liant discoveries has been borne by philosophers of our own nation. 
Some of our scientific men are also exceedingly good writers ; and 
a few have brought much power of mmd to bear on questions lying 
apart from their principal studies. On this twofold ground a place 
is claimed, even in these literary memoranda, by such names as those 
of Sir David Brewster, Su' John Plerschel, Professor WheweU, and 
Sir Charles Lyell. 

The Philosophy which grapples with the nature and the acts 
of Man, interests us more closely. It has been cultivated, in 
several directions, by some of the most vigorous minds of our 
day. 

Political Economy, constantly looking outv.'ards, and now ac- 
knowledged to be the leading science of those which rule the art 
of legislation, has of course been the favourite pursuit. Some of 
Chalmers's essays on such questions belong to our period, and 



THE SCIENCES OF MIND. 407 

many of tlie labours of M'Culloch. Later come "VVliately, Senior, 
and Jolin Mill, one of the most powerful and original thinkers of the 
nineteenth centmy. 

At the same time, the Pure Sciences of Mind have been enriched 
by some accessions so important, and these, although necessarily 
remaining unknown to the multitude, have excited so much reflec- 
tion among studious men, that our generation may, one day, per- 
haps, be thought to deserve, much less than the last, the imputation 
of being thoroughly unmetaphysical. 

Closest to the territory of practice lies the mental science of 
Logic, which has 'been vigorously cultivated in two departments. 

On the one hand, Whewell and Jolm Mill, the latter in his 
"■ System of Logic," the former in his " Philosophy of the Inductive 
Sciences," and the relative " History," have instituted inquhies 
which may be said to have for theu' object the Theory of Scientific 
Discovery. Theh pm'pose is the same as that of Bacon in his 
" Novum Orgauum ;" whose madequacy to the advanced state of 
modem science is now pretty generally allowed. In the principles 
which lie at the root of the systems, these two active speculators 
differ diametrically. Mill, whose work is one of the most masterly 
efforts of thinking which our century has produced, follows in 
essentials the tendencies of Locke and Hobbes ; while Whewell, 
less clear, but very comprehensive, is deeply imbued with the spirit 
of the German schools. 

On the other hand, some of our Logical writers have worked on 
the Formal Theory of Reasoning, the foimdation of the science, 
assuming the analysis of Aristotle as thek guide. Archbishop 
Whately has expounded the Aristotelian or Syllogistic Logic with 
admhable clearness and method, and illustrated it with character- 
istic sagacity : Mill, in one part of his " System," has endeavoured 
to justify it on a principle different from the common one. A 
more ambitious attempt, that of supplying certain deficiencies in 
the old analysis, has been made by several wi-iters. The elaborate 
scheme proposed for this pm-pose by the emment mathematician 
De Morgan has been fully expounded by himself : we are as yet 
informed imperfectly in regard to a scheme, promising greater sim- 
plicity, and taught by the Scottish philosopher whose name wiU 
close our roU of British notables. 

Sir William Hamilton has achieved for our age a place, not to be 
lost, in the history of Psychology and Metaphysics. These, the 
most arduous heights of reflective thought, have indeed been at- 
tempted of late by a- few other vigorous adventurers ; some of 
whom (and one of these a colleague of the present writer) will pro- 



408 TH3 SECOND AGE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

bably not quit the scene without having secured a distinguished 
station in the philosophic roll. But Hamilton stands alone and 
unapproached, receiving less than justice when we say only, that 
he is by far the greatest metaphysician who has appeared in any 
part of the British empire since the beginning of the present century. 
In his union of powerful thinking with profound and various eru- 
dition, he stands higher, perhaps, than any other man whose name 
is preserved in the annals of modern speculation. The " Dis- 
sertations " which he has annexed to his edition of the works of 
Thomas Reid, and the " Discussions" which he has lately collected 
into a separate volume, have everywhere been acknowledged as in- 
valuable, by all who can appreciate deep and subtle thought, com- 
municated with severely scientific exactness of method and of lan- 
guage. Those who have profited most by his wi-itings, are also those 
who regret most sincerely that these writings should as yet have been 
so few : and that the originality and learning which have thrown so 
much light on some of the highest problems in philosophy, should 
not have been applied likewise to others. 

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

8. This hasty survey will be brought to a close, when we have 
made ourselves acquainted with some phenomena of a distant 
region, whose fruits will certainly, in another generation or two, 
command a much more prominent place among the literary monu- 
ments of the English language.* 

The shelves of one library, we are told, contain thirteen thousand 
works, composed in the United States. The writers, too, while they 
range over the whole field traversed by those of our own country, 
are now keepmg pace with the most advanced steps taken by know- 
ledge in Europe. 

Refraining, here as elsewhere, from touching on the physical 
sciences, we are not, it is true, able to discover, in any other depart- 
ment of intellectual exertion, works which are entitled to be de- 
scribed, either as masterpieces of original invention or discovery, or 
as models of skill in the art of communication. But, in the more 
solid kinds of composition, much energy of thinking has been and ■ 
is displayed ; especially when those practical questions are dealt 
with, towards which the national temper and the cast of the social 
institutions concur in determining the public taste. While, again, 
poetry in its purer forms is beginning to take root, the'prose fiction 
has lately, like the periodical essay, been cultivated with very much 

* Griswold's "Prose "Writers of America;" third edition, 1849. Gris-; 
wold's " Poets and Poetry of America ; " eleventh edition, 1852. 



WASHINGTON IRVING AND COOPER. 409 

spirit and success. In respect of those circumstances which affect 
style, the position of Americans is much like that of Scotsmen ; 
and the results have not been very dissimilar. Their prose writers, 
with a very few such exceptions as Irving and Prescott, are vigor- 
ous rather than elegant : and, although they have introduced into 
literary composition, in a very small degTee, provincial peculiarities 
that are really Saxon, their diction is essentially marked by an ex- 
cessive prevalence of that tendency towards Latinism, which has long 
been increasing, though as yet not so far developed, among ourselves. 
• Our hope of future good from the Transatlantic Literature of our 
language wiU be the more lively when we remember, that almost 
all its past efforts may be said to have been made within a period 
of hardly more than forty years ; and that, likewise, the literary 
products of the latter hah" of that tune have far surpassed those of 
the preceding l^alf, not in number only but in value. There will 
hardly be set down, in this place, the name of any author that is not 
stiU alive. Those works that belong to the last twenty years, are 
very like in character to the contemporaneous writings that have 
appeared in England ; and their merit, if insufficient to constitute a 
brilliant era in literary history, is yet such as to strengthen, in no 
small measure, the claim of our generation to that secondary rank 
which it holds in virtue of our native productions. 

9. In the earlier part of the present century, the American con- 
tributions to our literary wealth were so few, that it did not seem 
worth while to take account of them in their proper place, A retro- 
spect is now required for them. 

Novels and Romances were the earliest specimens that became 
known to us. Brown, the inventor of several vigorous and gloomy 
fragments, was followed by two writers who speedily attained re- 
markable popularity in England. The sparkling humour shown by 
h. 1783. Washington Irving, in "Salmagundi" and the burlesque 
" History of New York," sm'vived to some extent in those later 
works through which we know him better, and which evinced so 
much of predilection both for English literature and for English 
habits and manners. Inclining always towards a finical elaboration 
of style, and a feminine refinement of serious sentiment, which 
combine to enfeeble their general effect, the writings of this graceful 
novelist and essayist are yet among the most pleasing to which our 
time has given birth. Very dissimilar to them are the fictions of 
b. 1789. \ James Fenimore Cooper. Griving evidence of careless haste, 
d. 1852. J i^Q^jj JQ ^.jjgjj, matter and in their diction, they are also dis- 
tinctively American, not in their topics only, but in their tone of opi- 
nion and feeling. No failure, asrain, could be more decided than their 



4.10 CONTEMPOKAEY AMEBIC AN LITERATURE. 

Strainings at wit or humour, and their attempts at describing or 
estimating the features of polished society : their picturesqueness. 
too, though striking, is in no small degree theatrical and over- 
wrought : but there is a wonderful impressiveness in the author's 
sketches from his favourite fields of observation, the perilous adven- 
tures of the mariner, and the half-savage life of the settler in the 
wUderness. 

Among the Poets who first attracted notice among us, and who 
belong properly to the last generation rather than to the present, 
the highest place must be assigned to Bryant and Dana. Neither of 
them is equal, by very far, to the best poets who adorned England in 
the time to which they are thus referred ; but both, and not they 
only, are entitled to distinguished consideration, if they are to be 
ranked among the less vigorous and inventive minds that are 
b. 1794. now among us. William Cullen Bryant is a sentimental 
and descriptive poet : he neither rises into passion, nor is prompted 
to deep reflection : but his thoughts flow naturally and easily ; his 
imagery is often fine, and his pathos as often quietly touching ; and 
his diction, always refined, is sometimes very felicitous. He never 
fulfilled the promise of genius held out by his youthful " Thana- 
topsis :" but his most ambitious composition, " The Ages," is a 
beautiful representation of gentle fancy and kindly sympathy : and 
among his smaller pieces, if there is no decisive originality, there is 
an ideality of taste which has produced some lyrical gems, such as 
the " Hymn to the North Star " and the verses " To a Water-fowl." 
Similar to him in some respects are Pierpont and Perceval : the 
former an exceedingly skilful poetic artist ; the latter more vigorous, 
though showing very often those unconscious imitations of English 
models which abound among all the writers now in question. Sprague 
is often very rich in imagery: and Halleck deserves notice for 
his peculiar mixing up of the serious with the burlesque. The 
b. 1787. little which Richard Henry Dana has written possesses a 
vigour that far exceeds anything exhibited as yet in the verses 
given to us by his countrymen. His longest work is " The Buc- 
caneer," a narrative poem, relating with great spirit a mm-der com- 
mitted by a pirate, and following this by a picture, conceived much 
less happily, of the supernatural visitation by which the crime was 
punished. The pointed, concise diction has extraordinary expres- 
siveness, not always without obscurity ; the landscapes are very 
vivid ; and nOt a few passages kindle into a dramatic force of passion. 

10. When, stepping from the last generation into the present, we 
seek to complete our roll of Transatlantic Poets, our attention is 
claimed by a formidable phalanx of aspirants. It may be doubted, 



LONGFELLOW AND OTHER POETS. 411 

however, whether, among these, there be more than one or two that 
have as yet established any stronger title to immortality, than that 
which belongs to so many attractive versifiers among om*selves. 

If any of their works are to survive, there will be found among 
them those of Mrs Brooke, which, although wanting in ease and 
variety, unite strength of imagination and intensity of feeling in a 
degree that has hardly been excelled in our century. Henry Wads- 
worth Longfellow, who is now well known in England, possesses true 
poetic sensibility, much original fancy, and a ready command of apt 
diction ; and the care with which he labours to make his very slightest 
pieces obey rules of refined art, deserves, as a protest against the here- 
sies of the day, the same tribute of respect which was lately paid to 
Tennyson. He has certainly crippled his genius by the unrestrained 
indulgence he allows to his German inclinations, and most of all 
by his thorough-going imitation of Goethe both in form and in spirit. 
The evil could not be better illustrated than by his striking little 
poem " Excelsior ;" where high aspiration, eager and baffled, is 
symbolized by a series of scenes, which, though separately beauti- 
ful, are all founded on an idea feebly and even ludicrously unreal. 
His model has misled him still further, in tempting him to disguise 
the many beauties of " Evangeline " in the cumbrous wrappings of 
the unmanageable and unmusical hexameter. Perhaps, also, his 
*' Golden Legend," with all its frequent felicity of thought, of de- 
scription, and of phrase, indicates both an ineradicable predominance 
of the exotic taste, and a fixed incapacity for the conception of a 
great design. 

Few others of the recent poets stand so decisively above the rest, 
as to claim a memorial in these slight sketches. The airy senti- 
ment and light elegance of Willis's verses would hardly claim such 
a distinction, were it not that his prose has attracted notice in our 
country. Among many pieces of descriptive poetry, some of which 
are better than any thing we ourselves have lately had to show, 
those of Street seem to merit particular commemoration : and, to 
us monarchical Europeans, there is something very novel and inte- 
resting in the energy with which Whittier poetizes themes calcu- 
lated to excite strongly the sympathies of his countrymen. 

American Novels and Romances continue to be poured forth 
without any pause ; and, with much of a tiresome monotony, and 
not a little that betokens both unripe taste and narrow prejudice, 
there are many of these which perhaps receive too cold commenda- 
tion, when it is said of them that they are exceedingly clever. It 
must suffice to name a very few of their authors, who should not 
be dismissed without more decided praise. Miss Sedgwick's scenes 



412 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

from domestic life, agreeable and natm-al and right-minded, have 
long been valued justly in England ; and unusual talent, exerted on 
a well-chosen theme, has lately made every one acquamted with the 
name of Mrs Beecher Stowe. The short prose stories of the eccentric 
and unfortunate poet Edgar Poe are contrived with a subtle inge- 
nuity of invention, that gives them an attraction not easily resisted. 
Similar pieces, and some longer works, of Nathaniel Hawthorne, show 
very remarkable powers of mind. Deficient in liveliness and rapi- 
dity of incident, and everywhere injudiciously diftuse, they have very 
great merit in style ; and they unite, more richly than most produc- 
tions of their class, unaginative with reflective strength, and quiet 
pathos with delicate humour. In pomt of spuited energy of narration, 
no works of these writers, and very few fictions that have lately ap- 
peared in England, come up to the tales of Eobert Bh'd. His " Nick 
of the Woods," although reminding us too much of Cooper's Indian 
scenes, is in many points far superior to them ; and his " Calavar," 
which told the story of the Conquest of Mexico before its popular 
historian had published his work, is one of the best historical 
romances in the English language. 

11. In turning to more solid studies, we must at once profess our 
want of qualifications for estimating rightly the American Theolo- 
gians. But (to say nothing of such older writers as Dwiglit) high 
value is universally attached to the critical and other researches, which 
were begun thirty years ago by Robmson and Moses Stuart : and 
it seems to be allowed in England that, both in theology and in its 
kindred sciences, the present leaders are worthy of the auspicious 
beginnings. None of the names, however, are widely familiar in our 
country, except that of Wniiam Ellery Channing ; and he, indeed, 
owes his European fame to his miscellanies, not to any of his clerical 
labours. He is greater as a writer than as a thinker : nor has 
he energy enough to claim honour as a writer of the first class. 
But his purity and seriousness of sentiment, his philanthropy and 
his unostentatious courage, have won respect for him, as a man ac- 
tuated by a truly religious spirit, from those who reject most de- 
cidedly his views of religious doctrine. 

Mental Philosophy, though apparently not more popular on the 
other side of the Atlantic than it is on this, has been prosecuted 
zealously by a few very able men ; and several of these have thrown 
their opinions into the shape of useful text-books for academic 
teaching. As representatives of this class two or three may be 
selected : Marsh, the meditative editor and commentator of Cole- 
ridge's musings : Wayland, chiefly known as a speculator in ethics : 
Upham, a judicious and rational eclectic, chiefly leaning to the 



MISCELLANEOUS AND HISTORICAL WRITINGS. 413 

Scottish school; and Tappan, an exceedmgiy strong and subtle 
analyst m etliics and psychology. In the same relation to phEo- 
sophy properly so called, which Carlyle holds in England, and very 
like him in more respects than one, is the eloquent, original-minded, 
and paradoxical Emerson. In the way of appendix to this section, 
we should be reminded that our language owes to America the 
ser\'ices conferred by Webster's Dictionary. 

The Political Oratory of the States must be overlooked, as om* 
own has been ; although it is a point worthy of notice, that public 
speaking of all kinds is there practised by literary men much more 
than with us, and that the printing of occasional lectm-es and 
other orations is a prevailing fashion. If a very cm'sory acquaint- 
ance with the matter were enough to justify a positive opinion, it 
might be said that Daniel Webster, the well-known statesman, 
while imquestionably very strong both in intellect and will, must 
likewise have possessed more of oratorical power than any other 
American of om* century. 

The Literary Periodicals, which are many, must be passed over 
like the speeches in CongTess. One of them, " The North Ame- 
rican Review," is well and favom'ably known to all om' men of 
letters ; and, among the names of its contributors, that of Edward 
Everett is the most familiar to us. Ticknor's recent work on 
Spanish Literature takes, with highly competent scholarship, a flight 
beyond the fragmentary criticisms of the reviews. Audubon, the 
naturalist, and the traveller Stephens, have literary claims entitling 
them to be named out of a long list of miscellaneous writers. 

We are informed that there have already been produced, m the 
United States, more than four hundred large Historical Works, 
most of which relate to the country itself. The fact ought to be 
recorded, as showing both the activity with which research is pro- 
secuted, and the practical tm-n which it is wont to take. But there 
does not seem to be any reason for belie^ang, that the Kterary 
merit of the works is at all proportional to their number. Very 
few of them have found then* way iuto the hands of English 
students. The Life of Washington by Marshall, and the useful 
series of Biographies compiled by Sparks, are among the exceptions. 
But two names only, both belonging to om' own day, call for parti- 
cular notice. 

George Bancroft, who not long ago was minister of the United 
States in England, has written several historical works, origiaal and 
translated; and he has now published four volumes of his most 
arduous undertaking, The History of the United States, in the 
latest of which, however, he has not reached the emancipation of 



414 CONTEMPORAKY AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

the colonies. Valuable both as a voucher for facts, and as a specu- 
1? 'or who is always vigorous though not often impartial, he is also 
an unusually good writer, forcible and impressive, though wanting 
in ease, and frequently pompous and artificial. Comparable with 
Alison, but not with Macaulay, he is, if mferior to both of these, 
superior to all other historians who have recently written in England. 
He has not yet attracted among us the attention which has been 
given, most deservedly, to William Henry Prescott. All of us 
whose age and position make historical reading possible, are familiar 
with his History of Ferdinand and Isabella, and his stiU more 
attractive Conquest of Mexico. Peru has lately been added to the 
series. His narratives are equally admirable for their animation 
and their grace : though far from being philosophical, he is solidly 
and reflectively instructive, in works which, at the same time, 
hurry us along with the fascination of a romance ; and, pursuing 
his studies under a deprivation ahnost parallel to the blindness of 
Milton, he has yet gained just credit for extraordinary fulness of 
research, as well as for scrupulous accuracy in recording its results. 



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